Cohesion in writing: Won’t anybody think about paragraph two?

 We, generally, spend an inordinate amount of time writing openings to texts. We are happy to analyse openings to texts. We are happy to get students to practice opening paragraphs. We are happy for students to experiment with how to start a speech. And, over the years, I’d say rarely is the problem in writing localised to the opening. I’d be bold to say that most students get it. They get that the opening should be interesting and engaging. Rarely do I read the opening to a story and go, ‘yawn’. Rarely do I read the opening to a piece of non-fiction writing and shout, ‘BORING!’. They get it. 

Most of the time, I read their texts and I am engaged. The problem comes after the opening. Yes, some openings are better than others and show confidence, tone and subtlety, but, for the most, they do the job. Signal intent. Tease the reader with something interesting. And, be a bit more interesting than a Geography essay. It is the paragraph after the introduction where the rot comes in. My reading flow crashes into the wall. The development of writing is a major problem for all teachers of writing. How do you get students to develop their writing? 

The relationship between the introduction and the next paragraph is really important, yet it is largely undervalued and underdeveloped. We are so happy that writing is happening that we forget the value of development. The planning stage is supposed to do a lot of lifting in writing. It is the point where students are supposed to structure the writing yet structuring writing happens during the writing. Mini decisions are made, when writing, that connect ideas and parts of the discourse all the time. I think we need to be more explicit about the micro decisions we make in writing. How can I connect this idea with what I said before? 

I have sung on numerous occasions about the beauty of a sonnet. It is the closest we get to the beauty of Mathematics. How the components link and connect is so important with a sonnet. That form, because it is so tight and small, forces cohesion. Rhyme scheme. Structure. Volta. Sestet. Octave. All work together to link and connect the whole piece. Fiction has a lot of things that build cohesion across paragraphs. A mystery. The sequence of events. Mood. Logic. That’s why the jar between the first paragraph and the second isn’t so bad with fiction writing. Students know that if I am writing about a character waking up in paragraph one then in paragraph two the logical thing will be to dress or feed the character. There’s a natural cohesion to story writing. Where the better students succeed is by building cohesion through subtle choices? 

Ideas for how students can build subtle cohesion across paragraphs in creative writing 

# Use of phrasing. Dickens excels at this. Having three or so words used in a variety of combinations to seed a cohesion across a text. The danger here is to use adjectives. A nice one to use is verbs. Associate a verb with a character and think about how you can use the verb again in a different context and combination. 

# A motif. Get students to think of a strong image and idea combination and look at how they can reiterate that in different ways. I use a crack as a powerful one. Students draw attention to visual cracks in their writing and they foreshadow the ending which explores a breakdown in a relationship. 

# Foreshadowing is one concept that students easily grasp when analysing a text but it is the one thing they don’t deal well with when writing stories. They are happy to write an introduction along the lines of ‘Today was the day my life was going to change’, but then that one piece of foreshadowing is then dropped for the rest of the writing until we get to the end, probably. I like verbal foreshadowing like that, but students need to plan for it. They need to structure their writing around the foreshadowing and not have it as a throwaway line. Think of how a student could build around these sentences. 

[1] I knew this day would come, but I didn't know it would be so terrible and life-changing. 

[2] Something small happened just then, but I wouldn’t know its significance until the tragedy. 

[3] I made a choice then which would change things forever. 

[4] She knew then what would happen, but why didn’t she do anything to stop it? 

# Light is such a natural cohesive device in writing. The movement of time is a default cohesive device for students. They love telling you how time has passed. Three minutes later. The next week. Light does it so much better. It shows the passing of time subtly and connects the writing together. The darkness in one paragraph links to the sun rising in the next. 

There’s just a few cohesive devices for creative writing. Nonfiction writing is a little more complex and I think we need to work with students on developing cohesion in their transactional writing. All too often, their writing consists of listing ideas rather than developing one idea. That’s because non-fiction, unless we use narrative elements, doesn’t have those natural cohesive elements. Instead, we have to work harder on building cohesive elements. The planned structure for this is so important. I tell students to focus on one really good idea. Then, work hard to convince me why that idea is so good. Their structure is based around the idea and doing something with the idea. The introduction is the stating of their viewpoint and their main idea, then we work around how to develop that idea. How can they develop their point? It’s a really hard thing to change in the minds of students. They automatically list rather than develop. For that reason, we look at a number of structural choices about what you can do with an idea. 

·       Pick an aspect of the idea and investigate it – Parents track our bedtime, our meals, our free time.

·       Give a hypothetical situation or scenario – Imagine parents being tracked.

·       Explore the end consequences of the issue - There will be no surprises. No surprise visits. No surprise presents. Everything becomes predictable.

·       Draw attention to the flaws or weaknesses – Phones are easily lost, forgotten or stolen.

·       Share the emotional impact – Freedom is precious, but parents are looking to rip that away from young people.

·       Share a history of the issue – Parents since the dawn of time have always wanted to know where their child is and what they are up to.

·       Define or give a clarification of something people might not know – Tracking means watching and following the movement of a person. 

Students then look at shaping an argument. For example, they could go ‘introduction - define - flaw - hypothetical’. The cohesive device is the idea and the argument is shaped around the idea. It is quite transformative when students get this understanding. There’s a shift in writing. Then, the practice writing becomes about developing and doing something with the idea rather than listening and repeating ideas.

For me, this term, I have been working on Q5 and getting students to work on that relationship between paragraph one and paragraph two. Instead of asking them to write an introduction, I have been practising how they move from paragraph one to paragraph two. I have been using the following as a quick starter. 

At the start, students just carried on the writing and tended to repeat the previous point. By about attempt number three, and after feedback from me, they started to get it. Practising the process really helped and I can see the impact in their latest assessments. Those micro decisions in writing have been identified and students are making decisions in their writing about how things connect and link. Thinking about what to do with an idea is much better than thinking of what next idea to include. Students are hung up on the amount of ideas when really they should be focusing on their best idea and developing that. 

So, if we are serious about developing writing, we need to be forgetting about introductions and looking at paragraph two. Paragraph two is where we see the skill and the level of writing. Writing will improve if we shift our focus a bit, because paragraph two shows us what a student can do in terms of structure and cohesion. Introductions are flashy, buy paragraph twos are clever. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

I love the smell of red herrings in creative writing

I make no bones about it but I cannot stand ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ for story writing. In fact, I loathe its very existence. It warps stories beyond all recognition. Makes storytelling a simple box ticking exercise and it is one that would put me off writing a story. For life.

Recently, I have been marking a set of Year 10 Question 5 responses. In the same week, I was looking at rewriting parts of our horror / gothic horror unit in Year 8. And, a simple case of happenstance made me join some cognitive dots. The Year 10s Question 5 responses were reasonable but they were not wowing me. Students had a picture of a beach and they were describing the sea and an island in the distance. There were some lovely bits of description and ideas, but they were flat and monotonous. They were full of bits of description and nice bits of description at that, but they were largely one tone. Flat. Now, it is easy to blame structure and a lack of ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ but something was missing. And, for me, that was a puppeteer. Story writing is akin to being a puppeteer. You have a number of strings to pull with an impact on the overall story. Students need to have an idea of the strings and when and how to pull them. A large number of strings are not used, but one or two are. But it is the knowing when and how to pull a string that is key.

Anyway, I was planning some work for Year 8s. We spend a term looking at gothic fiction and within that I have wanted to explore how horror directors employ a number devices when filming. Here’s some of the things we are looking at.

Techniques employed by film directors and writers in horror films   

A false sense of security – the writer makes everything seem safe when in reality it is not

Anticipating the worst – the reader is expecting something terrible and they don’t know when it will happen

Dramatic irony – when the audience knows something the characters don’t

Empty space – the writer makes the setting empty so that we think nothing can affect our main character 

Jump scares – this is when –  BANG -you get a shock suddenly without any build up

Mise-en-scène – everything that is in the scene / setting –how things are placed

Nonlinear sounds – these are sound effects that don’t fit in with the story – they seem odd

Red herring – a false clue designed to put us on the wrong path of what is really happening

Slow reveal – this is when the writer reveals a key piece of information slowly and one bit at a time

Stock character – an easily recognised, and predictable, character for the genre – we can easily tell who they are from their clothes and behaviour

Subverting expectations – when the writer breaks the rules of what we expect to happen in the story

Suspense – a feeling of being anxious or excited, but unsure of the reasons why

Twist – this is a reveal and it changes everything we know about a character or story

Underexposure – where the writer using lighting / darkness to hide things

Unreliable narrator – the reader thinks they can trust the narrator but they cannot and they mislead them

We need students to be puppeteers in the writing process. Directors are puppeteers. They control the story. They help direct the story and how the story is told. That’s why I think it is important for us to develop story telling rather than, solely, story writing.  ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ is about story writing but not about telling. Directors are focused on story telling.

Take our descriptive writing for Question 5. Here’s the picture we used:

How could you structure a piece of writing around subverting expectations?

Example 1:

Paragraph 1 – A beach is calm and quiet.

Paragraph 2 – A person steps their toe in the water.

Paragraph 3 – The reality is that they are stepping a toe in their bath at home. In a dull, tiny flat.

Example 2:  

Paragraph 1 – A beach is calm and quiet.

Paragraph 2 – A person is calm and quiet.

Paragraph 3 – Beneath the water several sharks are hunting and waiting for life.

Example 3:

Paragraph 1 – A beach is calm and quiet.

Paragraph 2 – A person steps their toe in the water.

Paragraph 3 – A person removes their headset to reveal that they are in the future – a world without light and nature.

Each of these structures would include complication, crisis and exposition but the story telling is key. How you structure the story hangs not on endless crises but around a structural device and how you use the device. That’s why I think, we as teachers, need to be thinking about how writers use a technique. Thought about how to use a device / techniques is imperative with helping students to use something effectively. The danger is that we give these devices to students and then expect them to use them without insight, understanding, knowledge, experience.

Let’s take another one of the devices employed by directors. How could you structure a piece of writing around a red herring?

Example 1:

Paragraph 1 – A beach is calm. Slowly a fin pops up.

Paragraph 2 – Something is moving in the sea while a person moves towards the sea.

Paragraph 3 – The person enters the water and the thing heads to them and dives between their legs. A herring. A waves sweeps the person out to sea.

Example 2:

Paragraph 1 – A quiet beach.  A person takes off their clothes and pile them up. They place a letter next to the pile and rest a stone on top of it.

Paragraph 2 – The person goes out into the sea and swim out to the deep.

Paragraph 3 – The person and returns. The letter has blown away.

I feel that we need to get better at talking about the structuring and creation of stories. We, often, through a lack of experience and knowledge paint story writing with big large brushstrokes. We need a more succinct and precise approach to discussing story telling. ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ represents this exact problem. That are four billion ways to create a complication. That richness is neglected when reduced to a pretty picture.

There is an art to puppeteering. We want students to be sophisticated puppeteers when they write, but we teach them as if they have a sock puppet. They needs strings and lots of them. But, they need guidance on what the different strings do and how to manipulate the string to create a variety of effects.

We need to teach students how to use each string. In fact, we, ourselves, need to be clear about how to use each string. It is not enough to spot a string. You have to know about the length, the connection, the amount of pressure, the position of a string. 

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Segueing descriptive writing

Currently, I am working with Year 8s creating their own ghost or gothic horror story and again it has flagged a problem students have with descriptions of settings. Here's a typical example. 

Moonlight stared down on the street.  A path stretched ahead winding its way. Amongst the houses there was an empty corner. Empty apart from one figure.  The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. A cat walked along the path. The house stared back with eyes so red.

Typically, students list everything and a setting becomes a visual description of item and object that is in the location. Now this alone isn't a major problem, if students effectively transition between the items effectively. Yet, many don't. For ghost stories, students describe everything that could be possibly creepy in a setting. Oh, if you are unlucky they will use the adjectives 'eerie', 'creepy' and 'mysterious' next to each object in the setting. They chuck everything at the reader with the hope that readers will be creeped out. 

This week the class have been rewriting their settings because they sat in the category of chuck everything at the reader. Prior to this lesson, we had been looking at atmosphere and how atmosphere is created implicitly rather than explicitly in writing. Along the way, I have distinguished horror writing from ghost stories simply by saying 'ah' and 'ooooh'. Added to this we've distinguished the structure of ghost story writing as 'oooh', then 'ooooooh' and finally 'oooooohhh?'. Or simply put as 'strange, stranger, strangest'. A simple way to get students to see that ghost stories are not about outright scaring, but a series of odd occurrences that build up.

With the Year 8 class, I broke down the original description to starting point, middle point and end point. 

Moonlight stared down on the street. 

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. 

The house stared back with eyes so red.

Then as a class we spent time looking at how we could transition between moonlight and lamppost and then lamppost to house. In our discussions we talked about music and segueing between one track and another and how DJs (get me down with the kids) segue between tracks by picking a similar beat or drip feeding one track on to another and fading the other one out.  

Moonlight stared down on the street.

It was looking, gazing, focusing on one thing. 

A lamppost. 

A solitary lamppost. 

The rest of the world was hidden under a blanket of oozing and spreading ink. 

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. 

Its meagre light battled against the majestic power of the moon, yet the oozing darkness held it back. 

Soft rays of light sheepishly slithered away from the post, defeated. 

Amongst blades of wet, cold grass the rays snaked and twisted until it hit something large and unmoveable. 

The house stared back with eyes so red.

  
The group and I attempted to polish it and look at paragraphing it. 


Moonlight silently stared down on the street. It was looking, gazing, focusing on one thing.

A lamppost.

A solitary lamppost. Like a lost child. Like an abandoned toy. Like a forgotten bag.

The rest of the world was hidden under a blanket of oozing and spreading ink.  
Empty blackness.

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. Its meagre light battled against the majestic power of the moon, yet the oozing darkness held it back. Soft rays of light sheepishly slithered away from the post, defeated. Amongst blades of wet, cold grass the rays snaked and twisted until it hit something large and unmoveable.
The house stared back with eyes so red. 



The group noticed that the transitioning between objects generated the most interesting writing for them. It was where the sparks of creativity came. The problem solving element of writing. How do we connect moonlight and a lamppost? How do we connect a lamppost to a house? As you can imagine, it sparked quite a bit of discussion and exploration. Some jumped the gun and tried to get a monster in at each stage, which we had them to rethink. We want 'ooh' not 'ahh', Tom.

Then, the group had a go at one of their own using the following points: 

The candle flickered in the wind. 

A pale bedsheet covered a sleeping form. 

The darkness under the bed opened its mouth. 

Here's one that the class created: 

The candle flickered in the wind.

Light danced across the room, like a graceful and slight young girl. 

It pirouetted across the floor amongst the unrecognisable objects

Often it skipped  and jumped over the larger objects and cast a shadow instead.

As the light dance in the wind, it briefly decided to use the bed, in the middle of the room, as it’s dancefloor.

A pale bedsheet covered a sleeping form.

Unaware of the flickering light.

Snuggled away from the light, the figure created their own cave of darkness.

Briefly, ever so briefly, the light tickled the figure’s face as it danced.

Still the figure slept. Still. Unaware.

The darkness under the bed opened its mouth.

The great thing about this approach, for me, was that it forced the students to be imaginative in filling the gaps and segueing from one object to another. The segueing created most of the atmosphere and automatically interesting choices of words and technqiues. The start, middle and end were just tentpoles for the larger thing. This is certainly something I am going to use with Year 11 for Question 5. 

Now it is your turn. How would you transistion between these three things? What would you put in the gaps? Answers on a postcard or Tweet. 

The trees swayed in the breeze.

The path snaked amongst the trees.

Amongst the natural sounds of the forest, I heard a branch snap. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris  

 

Once more with feeling – Question 5

‘Education has got steadily worse over the last few years.’

Write a blog arguing for or against this statement.

There are two running narratives that have grown over the last year or so on Twitter. One narrative is propelled by the idea that secondary schools have become some Gradgrindian institute which sucks out the life of students and actively and intentionally causes stress and mental anxiety in students. Another narrative spread is the destructive quality of the new GCSEs. The new GCSEs have been presented as draining creativity and freedom and leaving students as an empty husk empty of ideas and individuality. Everything has been attacked in the way to propel these ideas. Vocabulary has been thrown under the bus. Knowledge has been publicly flogged too. All for the sake of propelling this idea that things in education are broken.

Now, I would love to write a blog exploring the flaws in each narrative, but instead I think it is a great opportunity to help students to get better in Question 5, because creativity is found under rocks, slipped between the pages of an old book, behind a cupboard and under a desk. Creativity needs to be discovered and found rather than enforced. Or, occasionally, creativity is found on discussions on Twitter. Therefore, in the spirit of creativity, here are some ideas I have had with Question 5 (Paper 2).

Emotions

One thing you can never argue with is emotions. You can argue with facts, but you can never argue with feelings. That’s why a lot of writing today is dripping in emotions. Those are my feelings guys! I am just telling you how I feel.

I feel shocked, appalled and disgusted with the way that homework is demonised in society.

Emotions also make your writing interesting. If we stick to the facts, we get to the truth, but it lacks flavour. Emotions. You can’t argue with an emotion.

Tyrants and Victims

When presenting a strong case, it is helpful to present clear sides in the argument. Present people as tyrants and victims. There’s no need for ambiguity. Goodies and baddies all the way. A tyrannical system enslaves and oppresses people. A victim is helpless and innocent. One causes hated. The other causes pity and empathy. Present someone as a victim or a villain and you have automatic emotional connection. Newspapers lead on this. We live in a world where people are either a victim or a villain.  

So, if students are looking at a question about sport and its over commercialism, you could easily jump to large businesses as the tyrants and the poor, innocent sports men and women are the victims. Look at what those big meanies are doing to the little people kicking a ball.  

Paint yourself as the victim
By all means, champion a person, but what makes things more convincing is if you are the victim. You are then giving us a personal and confessional perspective. This is the problem from the horse’s mouth. You have experience of it first-hand. That trumps everything. They are all outsiders.

No counter arguments

Don’t go anywhere near a counter argument. Considering the other side only weakens your argument and waters it down. Just bludgeon your way through with your ideas. Take no prisoners. Blind yourself to the other sides. Only talk about the other side to point out flaws, weaknesses or to ridicule.

Yes, there might be some benefits of healthy eating, but you know they aren’t even as interesting as your argument. They are dull.

Shock

Use extreme examples to shock. One isolated incident can be indicative of a wider problem. It is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, you are exploring the change of the driving age and I just happen mention that my uncle died in a car he was driving at the age of 17. Like an emotion bomb, that little detail decimates the argument. It is not true, by the way.

Extreme examples have the ability to hide the flaws in an argument.

I’d say that Question 5 is perfect part of the curriculum to address things in a modern age. Some people have criticised the lack of media analysis in English when we are in an age of ‘fake news’. However, I’d argue we need to explore how people present an argument. How they use emotions to manipulate people. How they present themselves as the victim. How they present nonconformists as villains. How they ignore the other side. How they use extreme examples to paper over the cracks. We are no longer persuading. We are now convincing.  

The teacher is the source of creativity. Sometimes it is so easy to attack the system, when we miss out the key thing that is important. The teacher. The teacher is the guiding light. The torch. The lighthouse. The beacon. Let’s credit them for the creativity. Let’s look for the creativity together.

Bleeding hearts on the right of me and jokers on the left, here I am stuck with you.  

Thanks for reading,

Xris