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

Techniques for dummies

My presentation from the English Teachmeet

My presentation was a journey through my teaching of techniques. I discussed what I do to get students to explore language choices effectively. We have so many resources, yet we don’t have any clear step by step instructions of how to approach things and this is problematic if you are new to teaching English, or if you want to have a clear structure in your teaching. There is no single way to teach, yet it would be nice to hear how people approach things.

Our common approach to teaching techniques is often based on two approaches.  One: what students notice in a text. Two: asking leading questions highlighting key things.  There is also the teaching of a specific technique through writing but today I am mainly concerned with the analysis of techniques. Our questions usually sound like these:

•       Why did the writer use the word ‘++++++’?

•       How does the writer make the writing dramatic?

•       How are questions used effectively here?

•       How does the reader feel at the start and how does the writer create that feeling?

•       What effect does the use of emotive language have at the start of the text?

I have felt that the two approaches don’t always work well for me. They are two extremes. One structured and the other not. Occasionally, I might use both approaches, yet I have always felt underwhelmed with the results. In fact, I felt that my whole approach to analysis was limiting. Approach one was trying to build independence yet it was based on what I had taught students previously. Approach two was dependent on me leading and students explaining. Therefore, I needed to think how I could get students to explore without being too dependent on me.  I needed some steps and approaches that would stagger the progress from explain to exploring. We seem to flip at the moment between the two.

 

Independence – choices – exploring (A/B)

dependence – formula – explaining (C/D/E)
 

The secret I find to writing effectively about techniques is about doing three things at once: talk about what the writer has done; explain how the reader feels; and explain why the writer wants people to feel or think this way. Hopefully, some of the approaches below help to address some of these things. Each of these I have experimented with and I am still experimenting with them.  
  

Approach one:  creating sentences.

This worked really well as a starter as it allowed students to construct simple sentences that could be expanded at a later stage. It made students think and they produced some clever and insightful points. I usually get them to write 6 sentences as a starter or a plenary.  They then feedback their best ones. 

To extend it further, I have asked students to link two techniques together ( alliteration and 1^st person perspective) to show an understanding that techniques work in combination with each other.

Approach two:  offering them alternatives.

This I have blogged about before, but again it is a brilliant starter or plenary. It engages students quickly with its multiple choice approach. We are always asking students to say why something is used, which is like plucking something out of thin air, and rarely show them the possible alternatives. This approach gives students a clear alternative to say why the writer picked one rather than the other. I have used it with poems, plays and non-fiction texts. It gets to the heart of the choices and makes students think. The question, ‘Why did the writer use a simile here?’ becomes slightly more concrete for exploring when turned to, ‘Why did the writer use a simile instead of question here?’.  In their discussions they will relate ideas to the purpose and effect and structure without direct input from the teacher. They are simply exploring.

 

Approach three:  offering them precise alternatives.

A variation on a theme, but nonetheless it works well. Some teachers use draft versions of a text to explore choices, but this one worked really well. It removes jargon and technical terminology that bog some explanations down. Simply it focuses on the meanings of the words and how the word functions in the text. I had a group discussing endlessly the difference between look and glance. Harper Lee’s writing is quite simple, yet even with simple choices there are layers of meaning.

 

Approach four:  looking at the wider choices

Shakespeare is both easy and difficult to teach. This approach I have used before, but I am refining it here. Getting students to think wider as a writer is important. Here the students explore what were the big choices made for the scene and explore why those specific choices were made. Again, this is about making the implicit explicit. These are often the biggest choices made by the playwright, but they are neglected by the dominance of language features.  This is part of a bigger document which I will share later.

 

Approach five:  predicting the use of choice

This approach is my most ‘out-there’ one. The students are told the context of a scene. In this case, it was Othello killing Desdemona.  They have to explain why the writer would use the word ‘it’ in this situation before reading a single line of text. Students explore in detail why the choices were made. For me, this approach worked as it removed a lot of the barriers to understanding here – the complex language and numerous allusions to things students are not familiar with. Rather than decode a text, they were thinking like a writer. Why would you use the word ‘honour’ in this situation? Furthermore, it took out that annoying simplification of Shakespeare that sometimes happens. Why study Shakespeare if you are going to reduce it? The students were able to explore  the choices even before reading the scene. Then, in the reading of the scene an extra layer of analysis was added as they searched for the techniques or noticed what the writer actually did.

 

These are just some ideas and my exploration of teaching techniques is just an experiment with some positive results. I am going to take it further and apply it now to writing. For example:

Write a letter to the producers of X-Factor persuading them not to use the chairs again?

Opening:

rhetorical question vs emotive language vs fact

 

I am going to get students to discuss which approach is best when writing the letter. We will explore the choices at the same time that we write. Write like a reader and read like a writer.

Thanks for reading,

 @Xris32

 

Vagueness: AQA English Language Unit 1 Exam

I am not going to apologise for the blog this week, but I am going to be very specific; I’m going to write about one question from English Language exam. The problem with books on teaching English is that they are so vague. In fact, they are vaguer than Mr Vague Vagueness from Vague Street in the county of Vagueshire in the United States of Vagueness on the planet Vague. When you are planning a lesson on a particular question or thing, you don’t want some guff (sorry – I haven’t used that word in a while, but I liked it in that sentence) about what non-fiction means to society. You also don’t want a ‘funny’ quote from Dickens about how non-fiction can topple governments. What you want is some ideas to spark the germ of an idea. Hopefully, this will inspire you and I may even go through the other questions at a later date.

If books about English teaching are vague, then mark schemes for English exams are even vaguer. Step forward question one on the reading and producing non-fiction texts.  

The Question:  What do we learn/understand  about  …..?  

What do students have to show evidence of in their answer?

·         Quotes  or evidence woven into ideas

·         Subtext or what is suggested or implied in the writing

·         Summarising of points rather than repeating points

·         Key points of the article

·         Understanding the article

 

Now that is one level of answering the question. These are the standard 'bread 'n' butter' for teaching non-fiction. Do all of those things and you are not guaranteed an 8 out of 8? No, you need perceptive comments and engagement.  How do you show engagement in a text? Look Mr Examiner, when they read this article, they did a little dance. Surely, that is lively engagement and not just engagement. 

Perceptive Engagement

This is where we need to be precise with teaching skills. These are some of the things I would expect to see. Warning: they do not make a student get an automatic 7 or 8. These are some of the qualities I have seen in my students’ work.   

·         Facts and opinions

·         Awareness of various perspectives

·         Following how an argument changes in a text

·         Exploring different sides of an argument presented

·         Contradictions and inconsistencies

·         Expressing our opinion to things

·         The reader’s reaction to the text

·         Explore the relevance of the article

·         Explore what needs further explanation

 

There are probably more things that I have forgotten about but most of the time these things form my arsenal for preparing students for this question.

 

What activities do I do for this perceptive engagement?

 

Thankfully, hate is free in this country and one newspaper publishes its articles without charging people and these make great articles for use with this question.

 

Facts and opinions

·         Highlight an article for head (fact) and heart (opinion) phrases.

·         Work out the ratio of fact to opinion and then explore the reliability of this article based on that ratio.

·         Pick out facts and opinions and get students to categorise them.

·         Find facts and opinions blended in sentences and identify the words that create the opinions.

 

Perspectives

·         Drama: get students to role play being the writer and the reader. The writer explains what they are trying to do. The reader explains how they felt.

·         Explore how different readers would react to the text. How do men or women react to the text differently?

·         Describe the supposed reader of the text. What kind of reader would read this text?

Following how an argument changes in a text / Exploring different sides of an argument presented

·         Number the different points or reasons in the text. Then, rank the effectiveness or significance of each one.

·         Cut up an article into the different sides.

Contradictions and inconsistencies

·         Take a paragraph and look for what doesn’t add up. What doesn’t make sense?

·         Get students to think of questions that need answering for you to be fully convinced by the text.

·         Take a pen and draw arrows linking different parts of the text. Look to see how ideas are threaded through a text. The more connections they make, the more likely they will see the contradictions. It says here and here that this is true but in the last paragraph they say the opposites.

·         Take a pen and draw arrows and look for opposite ideas.

·         Put this article on trial. Create a team for prosecution and a team for defence.  The writer is going to be charged for libel. The class defend or prosecute the article. 

 

Expressing our opinions to things / Reader’s reaction to a text

·         Annotate a text with emoticons (if trendy) or emotions (if traditional). Discuss how we / the reader felt when reading the whole article.

·         Explore how our feelings are different at the end of the first paragraph and at the end of the last paragraph.

·         Drama: get students to role-play being the reader and explain how they felt when reading the article. At first I was afraid, I was petrified- I kept thinking he….

·         Teach students to use adverbs or adjectives in the analysis - Shockingly, the writer shows us how English books can be quite vague. 

 

I did try finding a funny quote by Dickens about non-fiction, but it was a little vague.  If you need more inspiration for Unit 1 stuff check this great blog out.

 

Thanks for reading  

Xris32

Personifying The X-Factor Chairs

Has Mr Gove taken over the production of The X-Factor? Last night, I watched the show and was shocked at how remarkably cruel it has suddenly got. It has always dwelled on the sad stories that the acts had and the things that have happened to them in the past, but last night I felt very uncomfortable. In fact, so uncomfortable I retreated into Twitter while it was on.

I have always had an uneasy relationship with the show. I liked the straight talking of some of the judges but detested the way the show manipulated my emotions, or tried to. Like the old exam system, there were people that didn’t quite deserve to get there. Wagner and Jedward are just two examples that come to mind. They achieved a lot, while others more deserving failed at an early stage.

Now the new format has decided to use the new approach towards education. First we have the phonics test – the audition with just the judges. That just tests your ability to read, I mean sing. Let’s weed them out at an early stage. Then we have the SATs tests, which, compared to the first audition, is 500% harder. The SATs tests are more demanding and challenging. First it was reading. Now it is reading, writing and grammar. Now, you are in a huge stadium proving you can sing, ooze charisma and handle the pressure. Get through both of these test and you make it to boot camp.

This is where I get uncomfortable.  The singers are now categorised according to their age and gender and then they have to perform yet again. This is where we get to the GCSEs. The singers /students now have to sing for their life. At this stage, they have worked so hard and received praise and encouragement by a system that says that they are good. At each hurdle, they have demonstrated their ability.  Now, there appears a figure who decides who is worthy and who isn’t worthy of going on in life – I mean the show.  Those worthy get to sit on a white plastic chair and those unworthy slouch off home. Yet, to make things even worse, you sit down thinking you have a hope of success, then in a second your hope is dashed because a judge has decided someone is better than you. Those that have worked hard through the system and done everything right are suddenly binned, because this is showbiz, darling. It is tough. Look at the recent GCSE issues, all those students who had worked hard and sat on their white plastic chairs. Those chairs were cruelly yanked out from under them. In fact, the chairs disappeared, as there was nobody to replace them with.

I don’t take any pleasure in watching people cry, nor do I get any enjoyment from watching someone’s hopes and future dashed and destroyed in one simple movement. Having young children, I see enough crying and snot dribbling that I have no desire to watch it for entertainment. The problem I have always had with The X-Factor is the notion that success is instant. This year they seem to have made it their running theme that success is about trying and trying again, and humiliation after humiliation. Look at how many old contestants have returned this year. Of course, they are a bit like an old character in a soap. A blast from the past. But, also they are examples of how success isn’t instant. Bring on the Year 12 students who resit exams.

Next week, or the week after, we are at the judges’ houses. Like A-Level, this is all cosy and nice. Lots of chatting and a relaxed atmosphere. Only a few succeed and get through. The rest are all told that maybe they are just not ready. Give it a go again next year, because then you will be ready for it.

Anyway, back to those chairs. Those vile, evil chairs that represent everything evil in this new format of the show. I am teaching horror writing to my Year 8s at the moment and I think the chairs would make a great starter for a lesson.  The approach I use for personification either came from somewhere else or it came from my brain. I will see which one responds first and then I will give them a credit.

Step 1:  Think of some verbs that only a human would do.

Sneezes

Whispers

Stares

Grins

Smiles

Nods

Shivers                                

Step 2: Think of an object.

The lights

The floor

The desk

The speaker

The microphone

The projector

The chair

Step 3: Add some adjectives to the object.

The harsh, cold lights

The clean floor

The high, towering desk

The warm microphone

The bright projector

The silent chair

 

Step 4: Put some of the objects and the verbs together.

The blank and tall speaker sneezes music  

The high, towering desk stares

The silent chair smiles

The warm microphone shivers                  

 Step 5: Add a simile at the end

The blank and tall speaker sneezes music like a pneumatic drill

The high, towering desk stares like a courtroom judge

The silent chair smiles like an assassin

The warm microphone shivers like nervous animal

 

Step 6: Adding just a little more detail

The blank and tall speaker sneezes music like a pneumatic drill, struggling to control itself

The high, towering desk stares like a courtroom judge, hoping to condemn  

The silent chair smiles like an assassin, waiting to get ready.

The warm microphone shivers like nervous animal, wishing it was somewhere else

 

This approach has always worked for me, because it takes out the large leap of imagination students have to come up with when creating some bits of figurative language. I have stood at the front of the room waiting for students to come up with a line of personification about a fireplace or a shoe. I have waited and waited and waited. The most able can create them with glee, but the rest struggle. Starting with verbs has helped my groups to create some effective ones. Building up writing like this is much better than waiting for instant success. This way we tease out the meaning and avoid success or failure. However, the idea of having six chairs in class and putting the six students with the best personification in them could have some potential.
 

Thanks for reading this,

Xris

P.S. I hear that next year that will be a different style of boot camp. There will be a two tier system. Some will get to sit on chairs; others will sit on beanbags. Those on chairs are promised a number one single. Those on beanbags are promised a chance to sing on a cruise ship.

Bringing Sexy Back – Sexy Sprouts 2

For those that missed my previous blog on sprouts, check it out here. This is a continuation of that blog, but it is also a reflection on my new approach to teaching persuasive writing, which I have named ‘Sexy Sprouts’.

Before I talk about the developments with my 'writing to persuade' project, I want to digress. I am a fairly young man, but I have accepted that I am getting older. Part of the ageing process, for me, has been not keeping up to date with the latest songs. I dip in and out, but I have accepted that I will never really be that cool teacher who listens to the cool songs and bands; hey, that’s life - you have to accept it. I do, however, know that some singers like Nicki Minaj have songs that would make the cast of a ‘Carry on’ film blush.  Recently, I heard a song used, accidentally, in school and I didn’t have the heart to explain the real meaning of some of the lyrics afterwards to the member of staff involved. I told said member of staff: "Never allow a Nicki Minaj song to be played in school."  Anyway, one of my daughters came home from school singing some rap song about shooting some caps… No, only joking! No, they both started singing this strange song. The only bit we could work out was the following line: “I’m slugsy and I know it.” We were both bemused. They couldn’t tell us where it was from or give us anymore of the lyrics; my daughters have clearly inherited my inability to recall any lyrics from a song, unless it is part of the chorus. In our naivety, we thought it was a simple thing about slugs, or we thought it might be strange twin thing. If the Brontёs can invent their own language, then maybe my daughters can. Maybe, I was seeing the start of a career in literature. It turns out that they were singing; “I’m sexy and I know it.” Thankfully, they don’t know the word ‘sexy’ and so they decide to use their own equivalent, slugsy.  There followed a fun game by my wife and I replacing every song with the word sexy in it with the word ‘slugsy’. I’m too slugsy for my body. Let’s talk about slugsy. Slugsy healing.

Where did this all begin? Sexy sprouts. Well, when I wrote the first blog, I was just sounding out my ideas. I thought if I articulated it in the blog, then it might make sense. And, it did to some people. This week, the students have been writing up their persuasive leaflets and, wow, what a difference it has made to their writing. There has, in my opinion, been a big difference between the writing they are doing now and the sorts of writing I have seen in the past. If I am being honest, I think I can describe old persuasive writing in Year 8 as being beige with a few techniques here and there. Some pieces of work stood out from the rest; others did not. What I notice now is that the writing is crafted, whereas before it was average writing with a few showy things added to it. To be honest, I think that is a lot of English teachers’ approach to things. We try to craft. We try to guide. However, we end up with an average piece of work with few gems in it. The A grade students tend to be the students that craft texts naturally. The other grades always try to emulate the A grades, but the missing ingredient is the thought behind the shaping and moulding of ideas. Gosh, I am guilty of this too. Come on, John, squeeze a semi-colon in and the Examiner might think you are a B or an A. It has always been about what you can add and not really about what you can do with the writing. Effective writing is effective because it affects the reader. A rhetorical question is meaningless unless its effect is considered.

For me, the teaching of English is now about teaching the effect and the writing in tandem together. If I am writing, I am thinking about the effect created. If I am reading, I am thinking about the cause of the effect. This is how I am focusing on things now. I am actively working on building and strengthening those connections. Currently, I am teaching ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and I have asked students to write a description of the famous transformation. We are exploring the use of horror and shock in their writing. I have explicitly asked them to shock the reader. We will later explore the devices they have used and relate to Stevenson. Hopefully, by doing this, students see the novella as a writer and realise why he didn’t make the choices he made. It may even open the discussion of horror and how horrific you can be with a Victorian audience. Reading and writing are complexly linked, but for years, I had tended to keep them at arm’s length. I focused on them separately and now I am looking at clever ways to combine them, so that one area informs the other.

So what did my Scheme of Work on persuasive writing look like? Simple, really - I followed this structure.

1:Disgust

2:Sexy / Desirable

3:Sympathy

4:Shock

5: Interest
 

I am just going to give you a quick overview to give you an idea of how things went. But, I need to make clear that I binned a lot of my resources that I had always used previously. Below is a rough outline. I have also included some examples by students for you to get an idea of the writing produced in the lessons.

Step 1 – Disgust
Pure evil. The worst vegetable in the world. A soggy, watery parcel of smelly green goo. It is as if the worst of every meal is scooped into one place and boiled down into one small little ball. Eating them is like eating sick that has been left out overnight and has little bits of peas floating around in it.

Before I started the whole unit, I gave students a series of persuasive texts to categorise. Without telling them the groups, students tried to group the texts. Eventually, we arrived at the effect of the texts. The boys preferred to talk about techniques, while the girls spotted the emotion dimension to the texts. Then, I introduced the text above and asked students to identify how the writing made the reader feel disgust. Their response was brilliant. Lots of ‘the writer uses … to make us feel this’.

Step 2 – Sexy / Desirable

Brussel sprouts handpicked by Scottish farmers. All washed in fresh, crystal clear bottled water. All the way from the waterfalls in the Scottish Isles. Feel the sensation as you bite slowly into the crispy, crunchy leaves of this round succulent wonder of the earth. These sprouts will lighten up any occasion. Be sure to indulge yourself on these green parcels of delight and joy.

As the students had a strong grasp of writing to create disgust in the reader, I asked them to turn it into the opposite. Make disgusting seem sexy. The writing they produced was effective and it was effective, naturally, as the students had the awareness already. I have always spent time teaching students about using certain techniques, when they used them automatically here. Why did I bother all those years with teaching techniques, when a lot of this comes naturally to students?

 
We looked at their examples and spotted the ways they used language for effect. Furthermore, we look at the lovely M&S food adverts and explored how they used language for effect. And, for a bit of speaking and listening, they had a go at narrating their own chocolate adverts. Cue lots of Year 8s speaking slowly and trying to speak in a deep voice.

Step 3 – Sympathy
How would you feel if you were walked past in the supermarket every day, with no one even thinking about buying you? Well, this is how Barbara and her family feel. They grew up dreaming of the open air, but when they finally got there, they were ripped and torn from their homes and were shoved in a tight, uncomfortable plastic box and stacked on shelves where nobody looks. Forgotten and unloved, Barbara waits.

A lot of my approach with writing for effect has revolved around the students writing a paragraph first and then looking at the features. This, for effect, works particularly well, as I ended up with thirty examples quickly and I could spot and share with the class the really effective examples. It made it easier to see what was and what wasn’t effective. Students were able to compare and identify what they had to do better. If I focused on teaching techniques, then students would be comparing a technique, which doesn’t make for great evaluations. Comparing one technique with another one leads to simple comments like: "I need to make my metaphors better." That isn’t too helpful.

After we had identified some of the approaches a writer could use to create sympathy, we then looked at a whole text. In this case, we looked at a charity letter from the RSPCA and we explored the different ways sympathy was created in the text. Additionally, we looked at how the sympathy changed over the text. It allowed us to explore questions like: Why doesn’t the writer write in a sympathetic all the time?

Step 4 – Shock

At 6 months old, they are ripped from the safety of their family and thrown into boiling water. Their skin melts and their leaves burn away from their body. Slowly, they suffer in pain as they die in the skin-blistering water. It takes 2 minutes for a sprout to die in boiling water. If they are lucky, they are chopped or mashed beforehand. The majority are not so lucky and they face this agonising death. 

I am glad that I looked at this after sympathy as some students told me it was the same thing. Thankfully, one or two students were able to make a convincing case why they are not the same thing. To support this, we looked at some anti-smoking posters. All designed to shock. This created a great exploration into how you can make shocking writing. It was harder for them than they originally thought it would be. We had the blunt and emotionless efforts and then we had the explicit and violent efforts; all with the emphasis on sprouts.

In fact, a lovely moment happened after this lesson: a student returned from an assembly about poverty to tell me, with a lot enthusiasm,  when the speaker was using sympathy and when he was using shock in his talk. The penny had well and truly dropped for one lad.   

Step 5 – Interest

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I know what you are thinking: he is really scraping the barrel now. But, I think it is a genuine effect that we should teach. Most of the effects here are quite concrete and you can provide lots of examples, but I feel that writing to interest a reader is still quite a tricky thing to do. This is where I switched on QVC - The channel of constant excitement and interest in the smallest of things. After 5 minutes of watching the channel, which you can stream live to your classroom, we had the general sales patter down to a fine art. We then tried selling the most random of things in the classroom. One student tried selling a single glove. Another tried selling a broken umbrella. I felt left out so one student and I tried to sell another student to our imaginary audience. Only his best friend wanted to buy him in the end.  

The End

Finally, I told the students to plan their own charity leaflet. This time I told them that they had to include a paragraph of each of the different effects. They could do it in any order, but they must have one paragraph that makes the reader feel the following:

1:Disgust

2:Sexy / Desirable

3:Sympathy

4:Shock

5: Interest

During the writing and planning, I heard lots of interesting conversations. However, they were ‘writer-like’ conversations.

·         I am going to start with sympathy first.

·         I have mixed two effects together, because I think it is more effective.

·         I am going to start and end with shock.

·         I will use some facts to make it shocking.

·         What name would you give a kind snake?

·         I am going to use a before and after thing so I can be more effective with my shock writing.

·         I think I will make the people attacking the animals my disgust paragraph.

When I think of the writing before, the students were always concerned with remembering to use a technique. In my experiments, I have found this emphasis on effect really meaningful, as it is the glue that ties things up in writing. Yes, they are persuading, but now there is a greater sense of cohesion between what they are saying and how are they saying things. All the comments made were comments that show students shaping and moulding a text to be effective and detailed.  I hear the bells of A grade students ringing. This is what I should be doing more often in lessons.

Where next? I think I might try this approach with story writing and see if students can write to different effects. See, creative writing suffers with the same thing: the blanket approach to effect. Stories are either scary or dramatic. How can I change the moods in a text? Next step: helping students to change the mood in their creative writing.

I would like to thank that Year 8 class. They have been brilliant. They ran with this idea and they helped fuelled my passion for this idea and they helped me see it through.

Thanks for reading,

Xris32

P.S. The title of this blog should now be called 'Bringing Slugsy Back'.