How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Lists, lists, lists
How to teach writing – Part 1

I believe it is better to teach one thing really well than lots of things badly. Over the years, acronyms have sprouted up to try to teach/force decent writing to/onto students. They have always, in my opinion, ended up with students trying to cram absolutely everything into one sentence or paragraph. One such example was AFOREST (as we saw, a simple acronym to ensure students use alliteration, facts, opinions, rhetorical questions, emotive language, statistics and tone, not much appreciated by examiners). It reduced writing to a series of bolt-on techniques. Through such a prism, a good piece of writing will cycle through a predetermined list of techniques. Writers don’t work like this, of course. You can’t imagine Jane Austen agonising over the fact that she hasn’t used a rhetorical question in a paragraph. Yet English teachers use this approach to engineer Frankenstein’s monster in writing.

Teaching often leads to conceptual reduction rather than clarification. I’m a big believer in teaching something in great detail and making students masters of that aspect. Over the year, we will keep coming back to things previously taught. Instead of repeating the reductive muddle of AFOREST, I ask students to remind me of variations, for instance, of using a list in a sentence. In my experience, students can write far more effectively by using lists than through employing some daft acronym.

Structurally, there are three main places to use a list in a sentence: at the start, in the middle and at the end.

1 Coffee, Twitter and music keep me sane.

2 I wonder how I ever coped without video games, TV and the Internet as a child living in Wales.

3 Wales has a historic tradition of singing, playing rugby and cwtching.⁹

Teaching students to write using lists is like going back to the beginning. The problem with lists is that they are generally used as a simple functional device: ’I need to list the objects I placed in my bag.’ Students don’t often see them as tools with which we can affect style or meaning.

A list at the start of a sentence can help to bamboozle a reader by linking odd combinations of words.

A brick, a carrot and a notepad are the things I regularly carry in my handbag.

A list at the end of a sentence can create a sense of drama.

The day was interesting: it featured fun, laughter and death.

A list in an unusual or particular place can create a sense of expectation. In horror stories and ghost stories, the power of suggestion is incredibly effective. The first noise is something harmless. The second noise is harmless too. By the time we get to the third noise, we think it is harmless but, in fact, it is a mass murderer getting ready to add to his list of victims. This ’rule of three’ can be used to great effect in stories.

On the cold, dark and lonely moor nestled a cold, dark, lonely house where a woman sat in a window with cold, dark and lonely thoughts and murder on her mind.

The man’s empty, cold and narrow eyes followed the people and his mind too was empty, cold and narrow, but the thing in his hands wasn’t empty: it was cold and narrow.

Lists aren’t just affected by where you place them in a sentence but also by what you list.

Now, my shopping bag ordinarily contains eggs, flour and milk. My annoyance, anger and humiliation became evident when I returned home to see I’d (incorrectly, mistakenly and stupidly) forgotten to buy wine — the most important ingredient for all meals. Well, my meals, anyway.

Listing different parts of speech (or other varieties of abstraction) can produce some interesting effects. Consider the effect created by the following.

A list of emotions. Anger, frustration and fury were all he felt at that time.

A list of verbs. The train shuddered, rocked, tilted and jolted over the tracks.

A list of adverbs. He typed the email furiously, frantically, fitfully.

A list of prepositions. The balls flew near, over and beneath the people seated on their chairs.

A list of pronouns. She couldn’t decide if it was her, him or them to blame for the accident.

A list of words with the same prefix. She felt unimportant, unnecessary, uninvited and unwanted at the party.

A list of words with the same suffix. The tree was fruitless, hopeless and meaningless.

A list of similes. Time moved slowly like a lazy, tired animal, like it had no care in the world, like a petulant child instructed to tidy its room.

A list of colours. The flowers’ greens, light blues and aggressive reds camouflaged the creatures hiding among the petals.

A list of sounds. The wheels of the car crunched, shattered and scratched the pieces of glass.

I could go on. There are so many variables. Yet we rarely teach students to experiment and play with lists. Students could consider how many items they might put in a list, or they could consider the order. The beauty of lists is that they are not limited to writing. Lists have a valuable benefit for analysis. They can highlight complexity and multiple meanings. ’The article persuades, shocks and advises us of the dangers of smoking.’ A sentence like this shows us that the student understands that the text has a number of purposes. If the student lists those purposes in the order in which they appear in the text, then the student will be commenting on the structure as well as the purpose.

A list of the writer’s purpose/message. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing highlights how men view love, how easily they damage relationships and how they struggle to articulate and manage their feelings.

A list of the reader’s/audience’s feelings. The audience respects, idolises and fears Othello at the start of the play.

A list of words to describe the text/character. Macbeth’s insecurity, naïvety and inconsistency combine to fuel his downfall.

A list of techniques. The use of alliteration, words associated with pain and the word ’danger’ combine to create a sense of fear as the poet expresses the reality of the soldier’s fate.

The list of possibilities is endless, infinite and continuous.