How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Writing from memory
How to teach writing – Part 2

My wife couldn’t stand English when she was at school and said her success in exams was down to her ability to replicate one essay. She produced a really good essay for a teacher and then just repeated it again and again. There’s an old saying that everybody has a book in them. What if everybody has one story or one essay? Should they be spending their years in secondary education improving it or looking to improve their ability to write hundreds?

This is contentious. Naturally, teachers want to make success easier for students and they will look for ways to unlock that success. Over the years, we have tried various approaches. The AFOREST acronym is one example. The problem was in its misuse. Students were blindsided into thinking that every paragraph must contain alliteration, fact, opinion, rhetorical questions, emotive language, statistics and tone. The writing was shaped around the devices. The content became immaterial and the use of literary techniques paramount.

Shaping writing is a problem for students. Really able students can shape and mould ideas quite deftly, but the less able struggle and will often stumble at the first step. Plus, how do you get students to revise for the writing sections of the exam? I think it’s ludicrous to get them to practise exactly how to write to ’advise’ and to ’review’. It’s a checklist mentality that doesn’t allow for much thought-shaping.

One thing I do is get them to revise something that they can shape their thinking around in the exam. Get them to revise the shape of their writing. Note, I am saying shape and not structure. Structures are rigid and immovable. Shape is foundational but malleable. Take this example for descriptive writing:

Paragraph 1

✵ Structure — close, closer, closest.

✵ List of emotions.

✵ Start a sentence with a simile.

✵ Ellipsis.

Paragraph 2

✵ Structure — obsess about one object in great detail, thinking about size, shape, texture and colour.

✵ Triplet.

✵ Rhetorical question.

✵ Colon.

Paragraph 3

✵ Structure — mood change.

✵ Personification.

✵ Repetition of the opening of a sentence.

✵ Reference to a Greek myth.

✵ Semicolon.

Paragraph 4

✵ Structure — return to the beginning.

✵ Contrast.

✵ Repetition of a word or phrase.

✵ Pathetic fallacy.

✵ Brackets.

Students learn when to put a technique, grammatical device or structural feature in a paragraph. The combination in each paragraph is important because it stops students overwriting sections and listing techniques. They learn about the combinations they could include and have an aide-memoire to prompt their writing. The content could be absolutely anything, but the writing has a balance of techniques and stylistic choices. The beauty of this is that it combats the dreaded overblown first paragraph which contains every known literary device. Take the following example:

Close to me the waves tickled the shore. Closer still was the sleeping wet dog my husband had insisted on bringing to the beach. The closest thing to me was my snoring husband. Pride, frustration, annoyance, joy and pity all competed in my heart. Like a troublesome teenager, our relationship was never predictable or controllable. Things hadn’t improved by the night when … or when he … or even when I …

Students can use the bullet points in any order, but they have part of a plan before they have even written a word. Then they can think about planning the structure around those bullet points. Furthermore, I add specific words and other little touches to their plans. However, I get each student to map out an individual plan each time so that the class is not replicating the same version over and over. The key thing is that they shape their writing to fit their ideas. I photocopy the plans and get students to add to and change theirs as they go along. This avoids every piece of writing being about pressing the reset button. Some students just need the confidence from a scaffold in order to write. There is nothing worse than going into an exam and not having a clue where to start on a question.

1 Dickens, Great Expectations, ch 8.

2 Find them @Team_English1 or by searching for #TeamEnglish.

3 See https://www.literacyshed.com/home.html.