More character traits, showing vs. telling, and scriptwriting preparation...

I began to feel more comfortable with my voice and writing style during my years at St. Michael's College. Many teachers helped me hone my skills, but one in particular - Dianne Lynch, the former journalism department head at St. Mike's -  provided me with countless bits of advice on how to become a stronger writer and journalist. I was happy to share one of her teachings with my students this week - show, don't tell.

For creative writers, show, don't tell means that instead of simply telling readers that the main character is courageous or persistent or loving, "show" these traits by describing the main character's actions, speech, thoughts, feelings, or the way other characters respond to the main character. Students used this advice when describing characters this week. They took sentences that used direct characterization ("Ken was nervous before his speech") and changed them to use indirect characterization to help "show" these traits ("Ken's hands shook and his stomach churned before he delivered a speech to the capacity crowd").  It was fun hearing some of the creative ways students experimented with characterization.  In addition to creating sentences that revealed character traits, students practiced interpreting the traits of characters from passages of literature earlier in the week.

These lessons concluded our work with character for now. Students will resume their study of character at the beginning of Quarter 3.

We closed the short week by preparing to write scripts next week. Before students put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), they reread the beginning of the play-version of The Dying Detective and compared it to an excerpt of the short story version of the same Sherlock Holmes tale by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We compared and contrasted the two versions of the story and discussed the ways in which script writers and short story writers differ when telling a story.

Next week students will begin writing a script based on an excerpt of a novel they read for Independent Reading Project #2.

Returned Assignments

No graded assignments were returned this week.