It’s the first Friday of the 2nd 9 weeks! Hooray!

Today, we started out by talking about obituaries in general. They are the written notices of death that usually include a brief biography of the person. We are going to write our OWN obituary in class. You need to focus on CARPE DIEM – how did you make your life extraordinary? You will need to be at least 75 years old (or older) – it’s hard to carpe diem a life when it’s short. Think about the Bucket List pre-writing and the Bucket List that we did this week – use those to find your focus. Is it family? Is it being successful? Is it helping other people? Use that focus to help you figure out details and events to your life.

Under Carpe Diem: Obituary, you can find instructions and examples, one of which being my own. Yes, I do every assignment that I ask you to do. The reason that I do this is so that I can share things that helped me when I did the assignment. The thing that helped ME the most when I wrote my obit was the Blog of Death. Seriously. I used it not for ideas, but for sentence structures and modeling.
For example, here is the first sentence of Demetius Newton’s obituary:

Rep. Demetrius C. Newton dedicated his life to improving the human condition, first as a civil rights attorney and later as a politician and public servant.

It’s a great sentence, but obviously, I’m not a civil rights attorney, politician, or a public servant. But it’s a great sentence.

So what I would do is this: I’d take out the specific information and leave blanks.

_____ dedicated her life to improving the human condition____________, first as a ________ and later as a __________.

Now that it’s not specific, I can add in my own information.

Vanessa Riley dedicated her life to educating other, first as a teacher and later as the director of the at-risk high school that she founded.

If you look in BB, you can see the rubric that will be used to grade the obituary. You need to have a minimum of 500 words.

Have a great week!