Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Correct the error in this AP brief:

Oklahoma tight end Jermaine Gresham will miss the rest of the season after having surgery to repair torn cartilage in his right knee against Brigham Young.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Do you think it's too late to start writing? It's a good thing Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't think that way when, at her journalist daughter's urging, she started writing books at age 65. She wrote about her own adventures as a child in a series of nine children's novels, the Little House books, between 1932 and 1943. And then she lived to see them widely published before her death in 1957 at age 90.

Interestingly, Wilder got an unusually early start on another of her careers — teaching. She was hired to teach in a one-room school at age 15 and taught three years while continuing her own schooling. She quit teaching at age 18 when she married a young but already prosperous farmer, Almanzo Wilder, whose own childhood is featured in Wilder's "Farmer Boy."

Wilder's motivation was largely monetary. A series of misfortunes, culminating in the loss of the couple's investments in the stock market crash of 1929, had made them dependent on their daughter. But by the mid-1930s, both Wilder and her daughter Rose were successful authors, earning substantial income from book royalties.

Wilder's success was due to several factors, including Rose's editing of her manuscripts, but it was absolutely dependent on one of the most basic principles in writing — write what you know. Although she was well read and interested in many things, she did not try to go outside herself in her subject matter.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would think the AP news release should have read;
Oklahoma tight end Jermaine Gresham has had surgery to repair torn cartilage in his right knee. The injury occurred in a game against Brigham Young. Gresham will miss the rest of the season.

Dan said...

Not sure, but here's my guess:
The end of the sentence seems odd: "...to repair torn cartilage in his right knee against Brigham Young."

Maybe it could have been: "...to repair torn cartilage in his right knee from an injury in a recent game against Brigham Young."

Or even better(?), remove the last three words. "Oklahoma tight end Jermaine Gresham will miss the rest of the season after having surgery to repair torn cartilage in his right knee."