How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Be clear about the writer’s style
How to teach novels

When we introduce Shakespeare, we tend to prepare students for his style of writing. Yet we often don’t prepare them for other writers’ styles. I’ll admit that the opening chapter is often a struggle for me. Not because of the plot, characters or ideas, but because I am having to get used to the style of the writing. It takes my brain a bit of time to do this, and I suspect I am not alone in being disorientated sometimes. It is probably why you have to prise Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Jacqueline Wilson’s books from students’ hands. They are comfortable, consistent and relatable. We get hooked on how people write.

I am clear from the start about style, and I explicitly tell students what is unique about the way the writer has written a book. It might be consistent throughout their work, or particular to one book; we all like to experiment.

Take William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. These are the things I’d make explicit about the style:

✵ There are large descriptions of the setting.

✵ Golding emphasises the way the setting looks rather than the way the characters look.

✵ Characters are presented through their dialogue.

✵ There is more dialogue than description and action.

✵ The dialogue isn’t always clear and the speaker is often ambiguous.

Of course, I could be more precise and often I am, depending on the class. What I’m doing is helping to reduce the disorientating effect and getting students to see what is unique about the way in which the text is written. Again, the writer has made choices. Why focus more on dialogue than characters? Is it simply because they are all so similar? Also, when students have these features of style clear in their heads, you can then explore when the writer deviates from it. Why doesn’t Golding use dialogue at this point?

When writers have a large body of work, it’s helpful to look at how texts are consistent with the rest. Is it typical of the writer? Is it unusual? When students have an idea of the ’basic style model’ the writer uses, you can then explore the relationship between the various elements. It can be discussed through the use of percentages, pie charts or graphs. The chapter is 70% dialogue, 10% setting and 20% action. The emphasis on dialogue could suggest that the chapter is focusing on relationships.

Take Dickens. We teach students to be aware of several aspects of his style. Style includes content, techniques and themes.

Content

✵ Young male protagonists growing up.

✵ Clearly defined good and bad characters.

✵ Comical characters.

✵ Melodramatic events.

Techniques

✵ Exaggeration/Hyperbole.

✵ Similes.

✵ Personification.

✵ Repetition.

✵ Lists.

✵ Triplets.

✵ Contrasts.

✵ (Intrusive/Omniscient) Narrative voice.

✵ Themes.

Themes

We also use pictograms and images to explore and secure knowledge of themes. ’Dual coding’ — the theory of which was first expounded in the early 1970s by Allan Paivio — is a particularly powerful way to help students retain knowledge.² It works on the principle of using visual and verbal channels of communication together to aid learning, rather than just focusing on one channel over another. We use it to help students learn, memorise and recall key ideas and techniques. We use a picture to represent a theme, and refer to it repeatedly in explanations, questioning and discussion. In subsequent lessons, we use the image as the starting point. Students seem to retain things better using the combination of symbols and explanations.

This body of knowledge is our starting point. Look at the difference between these two statements:

1 The writer uses repetition in the description of the character.

2 Consistent with his typical style, the writer uses repetition in the description of the character.

Seeing what makes and breaks a pattern is a skill we can promote in students. Going back to the aspects of a novel, themes and structure are all about how things are connected. We want to see the intent behind the masterpiece. We can’t rely on spotting techniques and narrowing our focus onto small sections. You wouldn’t look at a single brushstroke in a painting; instead you’d look at the combination. We need to do the same with writing.