How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Talk about clichéd writing
How to teach writing – Part 2

We need to talk about clichéd writing regularly in lessons. We need to be explicit with students about what is clichéd and what isn’t. Added to that, we need to explain when and why writing sounds childish. We’d all like students to produce original and creative writing, and we’ll show examples that typify that kind of work; however, we rarely call a spade a spade when discussing writing. We protect students from it. We’ll spot the accuracy errors and highlight the really good bits, but we rarely highlight the boring, the predictable or the clichéd. Take this example:

The car zoomed down the street like a bullet. Crash!

There comes a point in writing when the use of onomatopoeia is childish. It isn’t something good writers generally use — and if they do, it is done subtly. Then there is the simile ’like a bullet’. It’s vastly too predictable. It is shorthand in a way. The student has some readily recalled phrases in their head and they use them to get ’their’ ideas down quickly. With just a little bit of thought, that writing could be easily transformed.

The car swerved and skidded like a criminal’s polygraph test.

You’ll notice that ’zoomed’ has changed to ’swerved and skidded’ and that’s because, sometimes, the words in the rest of the sentence present the writer with no other choice but to use cliché when writing a simile. ’Zoomed’ is probably one of those verbs to which there are only four similes left in the universe that we could apply without sounding like a cliché. Curse all those primary school children writing poems about rockets and fireworks; they have singlehandedly drained that verb of any creative simile potential.

The danger is that there are clichés everywhere in English and some clichés are possibly more palatable than others. Ideally, we want students to select the more uncommon ones or create their own original phrases. However, we need to show the gradients in predictable writing, and we need to call it out when the most obvious ones have been used. Try ranking the following in terms of how clichéd they are:

1 The car swerved and skidded like a supermarket trolley with a mind of its own.

2 The car swerved and skidded like a child riding a bike for the first time without stabilisers.

3 The car swerved and skidded like a duckling on a frozen pond.

4 The car swerved and skidded like a criminal’s polygraph test.

As with most things, reading is the cure. The fact that we, the teachers, have read lots of books will help us to see that numbers 1 and 2 are quite common comparisons in writing. It’s almost as if there is a barrier of predictability that students have to break through before they can be more original. Our problem is that students don’t have that natural awareness or the knowledge from experience to break through the cliché barrier; therefore, we have to help them. The simile ’like a bullet’ and the onomatopoeic ’crash’ are floating on the surface of their brains and are quick to fish out. What other words could you use instead of ’crash’? What could you use instead of onomatopoeia?

We need to push them to dig deeper. To think. To think of better clichés. To think of less well-known ones at least.

Breaking the connections between adjectives and nouns

We are prone to cliché. There are adjectives that we automatically associate with certain objects. If I gave you two adjectives, sturdy or delicate, to describe a table, which one would you pick? We’d all pick sturdy. We have strings of adjectives readily linked to nouns. Take the following examples:

The typical sentence might be:

The delicate flower stood on the sturdy table before the shining window, which was like a deep hole.

Look at what happens when you try to break the ’conditioning’ of adjective and noun combinations:

The shining flower stood on the delicate table before the deep window, which was like a sturdy hole.

We make more meaningful, honest and interesting choices when we avoid the first thought, the cliché. How is that table delicate? How is a hole sturdy? And what is outside the window that makes it so dark and impenetrable? Clichéd writing is often just lazy writing. The writer picks the first word that comes to mind. This approach allows students to avoid the obvious.

Spelling out the clichés

I am grateful to Team English on Twitter for the suggestions that inspired this piece of work.² I asked them to tell me what clichés they often saw when asking students for a creepy piece of writing.

The dark, gloomy, scary, haunted room was cold. It had a spooky and eerie atmosphere. I could smell rotting flesh. The floorboards creaked under my footsteps. I saw blood dripping from the ceiling. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle and a shiver down my spine. It got colder. My teeth were chattering so hard you could hear them.

BANG. My heart stopped. My heart literally stopped. A book had fallen on the dusty floor.

I continued to walk even though my legs had turned to jelly. I was scared.

Suddenly, my hand was grabbed by something or someone. My heart skipped a beat. I saw the zombie’s face and its teeth and …

I woke up. It had all been a dream.

We’re pretty clear what we want students to create, but not always as clear about what we don’t want them to do, assuming that it’s just common sense, so we don’t need to mention it. Clichés are quite a difficult concept when you have little experience. Teachers can spot them a mile off because we have read so much good and bad writing. But, as our students lack this experience, they default to this method because they haven’t got anything else as a point of comparison.

I like to copy this example and give it to students and tell them that each phrase is like running nails down a blackboard for me and any other reader or examiner. We then look at how they can say the same thing but make it sound better.

Colour me

Texture and detail in writing is what gives it depth and interest. Students tend to be so obsessed with the plot they are creating that detail is forgotten. The chase is more important than the colour of the cars. A big job for English teachers is getting students to care about the detail. The fine detail. The texture. Nothing does this better than colour.

What colour T-shirt am I wearing? I am wearing a turquoise T-shirt. What kind of turquoise? Well, a light-coloured one.

The more we question it, the more detailed we get. One thing I like getting students to do is invent their own names for colours. Of course, we could easily go to the local paint store and steal some names, but I find it more satisfying if the students name their own. I like to start off by asking, ’What is the difference between these different kinds of white?’

✵ egg white

✵ paper white

✵ dirty white

✵ yellowy white

✵ faded white

✵ smudged white

If I’m honest, we rarely fully take in the colours around us. I think we have so much sensory overload daily that we focus out, so it is natural for students to not obsess about colour. However, when they do it can add something genuinely subtle to their writing.

The smudged white tablecloth had seen better days and it contrasted with the egg white of the woman’s dress.

I am a fan of the novelist Patricia Highsmith and her description is quite concise. She rarely wastes an adjective. The example above has more in common with her than with the classic giants of literature. Anybody can chuck a load of adjectives at a text, but it takes a skilled writer to use an adjective in the right place to add meaning. Ideally, we need students to create effective and meaningful writing by adding one or two choice adjectives. That’s why I am not too keen on giving students lengthy word lists. We want trim writing rather than bloated prose. I get students to name their own colours so that they aren’t just showing off but looking to create meaning.

What colour T-shirt am I wearing? Simply, a frosted arctic blue T-shirt.

Personify me

I find that building up writing in layers is helpful. Building up a sentence one step at a time helps students explore the choices they could make. The following are a list of steps I use with students to get them to develop and extend figurative language. Instead of writing an example of personification and plonking it in a sentence, they construct a bigger, more complex piece that links across the whole sentence.

Step 1: Think of some verbs 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 blank, tall speaker

The warm microphone

The bright projector

The silent chair

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

The high, towering desk stares.

The blank, tall speaker sneezes music.

The warm microphone shivers.

The silent chair smiles.

Step 5: Add a simile at the end.

The high, towering desk stares like a courtroom judge.

The blank, tall speaker sneezes music like a pneumatic drill.

The warm microphone shivers like a nervous animal.

The silent chair smiles like an assassin.

Step 6: Add just a little more detail.

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

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

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

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

Investigating similes

How much time do we honestly spend on a single aspect of writing? It is better to do one thing really well than several things badly. Yet we always seem to rush. If we want to improve aspects of writing, we need to dedicate time to it, and quality time too. I once spent two lessons working on crafting similes with a Year 9 class. We needed this time. Some might call this the mastery principle; I call it teaching. We started with several sentences featuring some pretty lame and clichéd similes.

The snow fell down like it was a blizzard.

The sword went through him like a knife through butter.

The grenade exploded like a rocket.

Linking back to the ’perfection’ element of writing, we were starting at the opposite end. We started with imperfect examples. Getting students to explain why something doesn’t work is easier than getting them to explain why it is effective. As a result of this, we were able to make a list of key points about what makes a good simile and formulate guidance on what they should do with their writing.

✵ Avoid comparing to something similar.

✵ Try to create some kind of emotional reaction from the simile.

✵ Make sure the simile isn’t comical or ludicrous.

The students were self-regulating and set up their own parameters for success. They led the success criteria. The original similes then became something like the following:

The snow fell down like a widow’s tears.

The sword went through him like a ghost’s hand.

The grenade exploded like the birth of a star.

At this stage, students offered ideas. Again, we repeated the process and explored what would make them even better. We made another list:

✵ Aim for a contrast between the item described and the item compared.

✵ Aim for something precise and unique.

✵ Aim to extend the simile with more detail.

✵ Aim to suggest the connection between the items through detail.

Again, the students created new similes and developed them further. We repeated and repeated the process over two lessons.

The snow fell down like a widow’s tears — nothing could stop the flow after years of holding back and hiding them.

The sword went through him like a ghost’s hand: silent and stealthily.

The grenade exploded like the birth of a star. Death and life held together in one split second.

Sometimes, just showing students a duff example isn’t enough. They have to live and breathe it to understand the issues. In one lesson, we could easily draft the same simile four or five times, but each time it gets better. Drafting isn’t always about rewriting whole texts. It can be rewriting a sentence or even a phrase. The key thing is that students learn from the process, so it gets easier. They remember the experience and they develop knowledge about what unlocks a successful simile. Like an uncontrollable snowball, they pick up ideas, rules and examples. (I couldn’t stop myself.)