Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label descriptive

A Descriptive Winner

In my year-long writing course at Dreaming Spires Home Learning , we held a contest to see who wrote the best descriptive piece based on the topic of going on safari. Here is our winner's response: strong in atmosphere but lacking just that bit of consistency for top marks. "The safari truck trundles along the dirt road, the soft hum of the engine the only sign of civilisation. The dirt road that it travels is smooth and worn from many long years of use. Around the open-backed vehicle, the long, waving fronds of grass roll past like tiny waves in the wind, flowing like a stream. The jeep seems to be floating, sailing along the yellow-green sea. Trees stand out against the sky, a fishbowl of brightest blue above our heads. The sun shines down on us, and a drowsy heat sets in. The whole world, rippling like the grass below us, seems to be slowly drifting beneath the far away sky. Animals move in the distance, blurred shapes in the heat. The tall neck of a giraffe can be...

A Plea about Descriptive Writing

Please, please, please, please, please ... Are you listening???  Good. I'm going to say this just one more time. So even if the exam task for descriptive writing asks you to include thoughts and feelings, it doesn't mean to digress into interior monologue about how you felt about something, about your thoughts, your flashbacks, your back story, what you hope to find in the future. In order to REVEAL your thoughts and feelings in a DESCRIPTION, you overlay value to the objects you choose to focus on, you add atmosphere to the moment. How about an example? A long time ago, there was a descriptive task about being on a cable car that suddenly stopped. Here's how you DON"T show your thoughts and feelings for a description: We were stuck sky-high on a cable car and I was hoping that someone would come get us soon. My phone's battery was dead, though, and the lady next to me seemed to be about a hundred-thousand years ...

About those Pesky Descriptive Questions

Usually, I think descriptive questions in Paper 3 of the CIE 0500 IGCSE are easier than narrative questions, but this year was an exception. I thought they were rather difficult, and invited narrative approaches which, of course, would limit a student's success on it. Earlier this summer, I was discussing this in a private Skype with one of my students, and we decided to have a challenge. Each of us would write our version of the descriptive piece based on the actual exam question. His parents joined in, too. Here are the results of that little game that we played, published on the  Facebook Page.    In the next post, I'm going to try to tease out the process I used for tackling a hard descriptive question like this, and make some systematic suggestions should this trend for vague and narrative continue. Enjoy! PS Why not respond in a comment with YOUR descriptive answer, or pop over to the FB page and add yours there? It would be fun! FROM FB PAGE: Her...