A blog of my running thoughts while reading. *Warning: Spoilers*
The very last chapter is about visual poems, which means that there is no conclusion or epilogue of any kind. It feels weird that the book just stops with nothing tying it together or wrapping it up. It just felt strange. The chapter was good, but it wasn’t an ending of any kind. The book needed an ending send-off chapter!
Cassedy’s chapter on rhyme and rhythm didn’t impress me very much. It was too focused on poetry with set rhymes and with the names of things. Why does a book that assumes so many major gaps in what kids will know about basic writing spend time defining dactyls and triolits? It’s unnecessary, confusing and complicated! Just let kids explore rhythm and poetry as they wish without throwing in complicated words and confining strictures. It sounds like school and all the things that make people think that they don’t like poetry!
I’m so glad that this book had a chapter on the sounds of words! I wish Cassedy had not just said it is important for poetry, but also introduced it as a prose technique. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this book is focused on writing poetry. While I think poetry is important, I’d like equal time to have been given to prose writing.
The chapter on haiku was ok, but it took Cassedy too long to say that you don’t have to follow the rules. Most of her examples failed to follow the rules, even before she stated this was allowed. I’m also not sure that her first two examples made a good set of comparisons at all. Little Miss Muffet’s encounter with the spider is very little like the simple haiku story about the dragonfly!
Cassedy makes writing riddle poems sound much easier than it actually is. I’m glad that she included this type of poetry, since it can be so much fun and there’s no reason not to encourage kids to write it, but it is often very difficult and I guess I wish she had acknowledged that.
Cassedy’s overview of various types of imagery was ok, but very far from comprehensive. It was a good introduction for kids who might never have encountered similes and metaphors before, though. Her suggestion about creating images around a leaf was a bit strange, in my opinion. I just would rather images came more organically than that, the leaf in its natural habitat would have been a much better subject! Or maybe not a leaf at all.
I get what Cassedy was trying to say about writing about feelings, but I didn’t feel like she wrote it terribly well. She used a couple of good examples and a couple that didn’t feel like they quite fit right. A couple of times she said things that really bugged me (and this is just one of my pet peeves, sorry) like “feelings make you think you’re something else - a lonely gull, an angry wind…”. I hate that! Don’t encourage that! Yes, you are lonely and you want to use the image of the gull. Don’t say the gull is lonely! That’s just wasting the image! You’re lonely like a solitary gull on the ocean, far from any other living thing and flying over a vista of water as far as the eye can see. Evoke lonely, don’t say it! Otherwise you may as well say “I was lonely” and leave it at that. Ok, pet peeve rant over now. Sorry about that. 
Cassedy’s definition of poetry is very simple. I’m not sure that I like it. I like that she explained that poems don’t have to rhyme or have really any format at all to be poems, but I’m not sold on her “a poem is a feeling” definition. What about story poems? What are they? They aren’t really feelings, so her definition doesn’t work for them. There are many other poems it doesn’t work for either.
I know. I’m being picky. I don’t care.
Cassedy does a really good job of explaining how to write a basic book review. She goes over summarizing the plot, discussing the author’s style and expressing your thoughts on the book. She’s gearing her instructions more towards book reports than proper reviews, though, so it comes out sounding like the review or report should be several pages long!
It did make me want to read more reviews written by kids, though!
The chapter on factual reports wasn’t nearly as good as the rest of the book has been so far. I understand why she included it, but it felt really incomplete. It just barely touched on the subject and didn’t explain anything well. Her explanation of how to do a bibliography was particularly lacking. I found this chapter quite disappointing.