How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Setting and the basic building blocks for creating meaning
How to teach writing – Part 2

There is an elephant in the room when we talk about teaching writing, and that is the students’ lack of experience. They have little experience of how writers structure and order things, so they struggle to accommodate these concepts. There’s no real surprise that the best writers in a class are often the regular readers. It is as if with every book they read they pick up one little nugget of gold. The more they read, the more nuggets you are likely to spot in their work.

The difficult question for any teacher is how to bridge the gap between inexperience and its more grown up cousin. We want inexperienced readers to write like experienced readers. What can we do to support this? Again, I’d say we need to be explicit about the choices students can make and their impact. Let’s take setting. Describing a setting is one of the writing tasks in the new GCSE and, to be honest, most stories feature some description, otherwise they would take place in an empty void. But how the setting is described has an incredibly important effect and meaning.

I give students the following list of choices a writer might make when describing a location. I get them to pick four. From the start, I’ll always make it clear what sort of effect the writing needs to create.

Describe a sound and then reveal what is causing it.

Describe normality and then spot something that isn’t normal.

Describe something that isn’t really there and is just imagined by the narrator.

Describe the feeling of the place. Don’t describe anything else, just the feeling. It feels like a day … It feels like when a …

Describe an object but make it sound like something else. Then reveal what it really is.

Describe the movement of an object or part of the object. Give a list of verbs describing the action.

Something is blocking your view of the object. Describe what’s blocking your view and describe the tiny glimpse you get of the object you want to see.

Describe how an object’s appearance changes the closer you get to it.

Describe the lack of something. There isn’t a … or a … or a …

Describe the texture of an object before revealing what it is.

Describe a nice object and then an unpleasant object.

Describe a change in the room.

Describe the main source of light and how it touches things in the setting.

Describe a moment of silence.

Describe an object and then comment on how it links to/reflects the owner of the room.

Describe a change in temperature and the narrator’s exploration of the source of the change.

Describe the light and how it falls. Then describe it falling on an object.

Describe an object through colours. Then reveal what it is.

Describe three objects using the same phrase.

Describe an object as if it were a person.

Describe how an object links, or doesn’t link, to another item next to it.

Describe how an object reminds the narrator of something that happened to them.

Describe how an object reminds the narrator of a similar object from their past.

Imagine I’m a student writing about a setting that was peaceful. I might select the following choices:

Describe the main source of light and how it touches things in the setting.

Describe a moment of silence.

Describe a sound and then reveal what is causing it.

Describe the light and how it falls. Then describe it falling on an object.

Let’s say I’m describing a classroom and trying to make that sound peaceful. Oh the irony. I might come up with sentences like these:

Tables, chairs and displays felt the warm glow of the light gently stretched across them.

Time stopped still. It breathed in and held its breath. Silence.

The rhythm of soft, scratching noise could be heard again and again as the clock watched on.

Sunlight from the window blanketed itself across everything.

Then, when I have these ready, I can play around with the structure of the paragraph and add extra sentences if needed.

Sunlight from the window blanketed itself across everything. Tables, chairs and displays felt the warm glow of the light gently stretched across them. The rhythm of soft, scratching noise could be heard again and again as the clock watched on. Time stopped still. It breathed in and held its breath. Silence.

The transformation from the original list to the final paragraph has involved several choices. I started with light to help focus on the atmosphere. I felt that the silence should go after the ticking of the clock as it made the ending of the paragraph more dramatic. What we have here is a structured piece of writing that has been created with very little teacher input. The beauty of this approach is that you are teaching students to see the choices in their own writing, and this will inform their analysis of the work of other writers.

I typically follow this activity by reading a description by another writer. Of course, there are hundreds of possibilities and my list is not definitive, but it gives students an idea of how writers have options. They could see how Dickens uses two of these, partly, in a description in Great Expectations:

This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked and was told from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty large room that was well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture, though much of it was of forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass, and that I made out at first sight to be a fine lady’s dressing-table.¹

They could go even further and articulate how the writer structured the extract and create their own descriptions, if necessary.

✵ Describe the narrator’s feelings.

✵ Describe a sound.

✵ Describe the source of the light.

✵ Describe the lack of other sources of light.

✵ Describe what the light has fallen onto.

✵ Describe an object with the most light on it.

Then we can explore the reasons behind Dickens’ choice. What is the impact of starting with the narrator’s feelings? Why focus on sound rather than light first?

Reading is the performance-enhancing drug that all students need in English. Even if we cram every lesson with reading, more is always needed to become highly proficient. Sometimes, we need a purer form of the drug. We need to give them the insight that is only gained naturally from a reading habit. This is the closest we can get to making students voracious readers without sitting with them every day listening to them read. It is about making the implicit explicit to the students.