A Few Tips to Remember When Writing (A parody of "A Late Walk," by Robert Frost)

A Few Tips to Remember When Writing:

When I use parallelism and align like phrases in a row,

The endings -ly or -ing,

Smoothly will the sentence flow,

I won't have to worry about a thing.

And when I remember to capitalize,

The first and important letters I make

Uppercase, like my I’s,

And it is hard to make a mistake.

A comma is important, without it our writing would sound absurd,

But avoid using it between independent clauses. Instead,

Disturb the sentence with a period, semicolon, or connecting word,

It becomes easy once it’s in your head.

I have learned the difference between who and whom

By replacing them with who or him, hand in hand,

I know of the words whose meanings we incorrectly assume,

From punctuation to concision, these writing rules help us understand.

A parody of Robert Frost's "A Late Walk:"

When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

I decided to make my poem instructional, including a number of elements from our Style and Usage guide. I included parallelism, capitalization, the importance of commas (and the importance of avoiding comma splices), and briefly mentioned pronoun cases, and commonly confused words. I wanted to find a poem with a lot of repetition to create a parody of. "A Late Walk" had a simple structure, with lines beginning with words that I could use to introduce topics. I tried to follow the format as closely as possible, and if the words were hard to use, I changed them slightly. For example, I didn't know how to use "up" so I changed it to "uppercase." And though the last line of the last stanza doesn't begin with a "to," it includes one. I decided to keep the rhyming scheme, as it made the poem more memorable, even if it throws off the number of syllables.