Improving your skills for scholarship and Naplan tests, and for VCE preparation
Creative writing
To improve your creative writing, we must get immersed into “people stories” or stories about people (simple stories but with a meaningful theme – people and their experiences of conflict)
Read short stories : use these stories as a model to improve one.
- How the author describes, and builds the scene – their descriptions
- Simple stories –that have a complex message – and that explore a combination of complicated and conflicting emotions.
- Are You: good example of “show not tell”; the author maintains good control over the narrative; the young girl’s anxiety is evident in her focus/obsession on the knife which also becomes symbolic of her mental problems; the author also explores complicated emotions in a simple manner; she includes a flashback for contrast and to provide more info about the problems that the girl is going through. (Character description of the young girl. Short)
- Joy Hopwood’s anecdote – gives an example of her problems/relationship with her mother and it ends with a message: anecdote/personal story to explain / describe her personal pain with her school friends; the dilemma: do I defend my mother and risk being ridiculed or do just go along with my friends because I want to be part of the group?
- Ami Choi’s story : read the Amy Choi – and also describe her pain and her relationship with her grandfather and with her family members. (A short paragraph – analysis)
- Two of Us – read the stories and think about people undergoing difficulties; coping with adversity ; summarise the story of Kayne; these anecdotes are always useful for little creative stories; people stories in a persuasive essay
- People stories – and anecdotes about people (Two Of Us)
- Stories of young people in a difficult place (eg. Kyle suffered during a bushfire)
Vocab and expression
Please learn the tone words (Yellow Essay work book) pp. 116-117 . These words are useful for analysis of persuasive work and also for writing dialogue in creative essays. (Writing dialogue more effectively, means that we must capture an individual’s idiosyncratic personality traits – thoughts, feelings and behaviour.)
Persuasive essays (text response/book essays)
Topic sentences: pinpoint key ideas as sharply as possible (and make sure that a series of ideas are different and not overlapping); p. 12 and p 17.
Evidence : variety /combination of evidence: p. 21; (think about people stories – adds interest, emotion; adds a real-life example so that we can really think about the positives or negatives) . WE have to think carefully about the way that we present people; and think about the particular circumstances.)
How we use that evidence: common sense; logic; comparisons pp 27-28’
Exercises 5 – 10, pp. 23 – 31
- Exercise 5 – whose opinion do we trust the most? Some expert opinion is more trustworthy than others.
- Statistics – what do they prove?
- People stories – what do they prove?
- Ex 8 – the range of evidence that authors use to prove a point. What does the evidence prove? (use common sense and logic)
- Ex 9-10: Comparisons/analogies – they are very powerful in persuasive pieces.
- Choose one of these exercises and write a short – 2 paragraph – essay
Check out: http://www.englishworks.com.au/yellow-chapter-2-reasoning/
Lots of suggestions and sample sentences…
Blue Grammar Workbook
We will go over some simple and advanced rules of grammar in order to write better sentences; in order to keep control over our sentences and write in a more sophisticated manner.
- Exercises 44 and 45: Subjects, predicates and objects
- Exercises 50 and 51: phrases and clauses (p. 46 – 47)