THE CRAFT OF WRITING

ABSTRACTStudents must strengthen and extend their knowledge, skills and confidence as accomplished writers. They need to write for a range of audiences and purposes using language to convey ideas and emotions with power and precision.

Knox Grammar School – yagerk@knox.nsw.edu.au

CRAFT OF WRITING

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that

exercise, the muscles seize up’’ Jane Yolen.

“When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located

the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path,

you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The

path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back” (Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life

begins’).

You are encouraged to write frequently and to experiment with form, language and syntax. You need to spend time immersing yourself in the writing process.

THE CRAFT OF WRITING

The Craft of Writing, students should be able to:

Write for a range of audiences and purposes using language to convey ideas and emotions with power and precision

Evaluate how writers use language creatively and imaginatively for a range of purposes - insights, emotion and vision to shape perspectives

Appreciate, analyse and evaluate the power of language Consider purpose, audience and context to deliberately shape meaning Produce highly crafted imaginative, discursive, persuasive and informative

texts

EXAM STYLE QUESTIONS1. “Someday we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are

things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you” (Maya Angelou).

a. Use this statement as a stimulus for the opening of a piece of persuasive, discursive or imaginative writing that expresses your perspective about the power of words. (10 marks)

b. Reflect on how ONE text you have studied has reinforced your understanding of the importance of the power and precision of language. (10 marks)

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2. “The opening of text should immediately hook the responder if they are going to be engaged emotionally and intellectually.”

a. Write the opening for a persuasive, discursive or imaginative text that engages the reader emotionally and intellectually. (12 marks)

b. Select the opening of one of your prescribed texts from either Module A, B or C, and evaluate how this opening informed your understanding of how to ‘hook’ the responder? (8 marks)

3. “Composers use unique voices to convey their key concerns.”

a. Compose an excerpt from a persuasive, discursive or imaginative text that reflects the unique voice of one text you have studied by using the same person and tense to convey a key concern. (12 marks)

b. Justify how you have appropriated the unique voice of ONE text you have studied. Ensure that you refer to the use of person and tense. (8 marks)

a.

b.

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4. “The context, perspective and purpose of a composer influence the choices they make when constructing their texts and the insights they wish to provoke.”

a. Compose an excerpt from a persuasive, discursive or imaginative text that conveys a significant insight and reflects an intended purpose and your perspective and context. (12 marks)

b. Justify your choice of text form and insight, and explain how they reflect your purpose, perspective and context? (8 marks)

5. “Graffiti or street art is often designed to express a concern or question what is happening in society.”

a. Create the setting for an imaginative piece of writing that incorporates graffiti or street art as a central focus. Ensure that a key concern is evident. (10 marks)

b. Explain how you used the graffiti as a central focus. (10 marks)

6. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them” Orson Scott Card.

a. You have encountered interesting stories in the prescribed texts you have studied. Each of these texts featured an ending that was carefully crafted. Reflect on which ending captured your imagination and why? (8 marks)

b. Use this ending as the stimulus to compose the ending of your own original persuasive, discursive or imaginative text that features an interesting story. (12 marks)

THE CHALLENGES: IMAGINATIVE RESPONSES

“Texts that represent ideas, feelings and mental images in words or visual images. An imaginative text might use metaphor to translate ideas and feelings into a form that can be communicated effectively to an audience” (NESA Glossary)

Language

Be aware of every word that you use: The sound of the vowels and consonants to amplify or create euphony,

discordance or disruption

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Plosive or fricative consonants Long or short vowel sounds Verbs the muscles of writing Striking imagery through figurative devices and word choice Lexical density! Verbal cinema - Looking through the lens of a camera to write Tricolon. E.g. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin – “Car horns.

Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles.”

Syntax

Playing with syntax. E.g. Hyperbaton – unusual inversion of word order in a sentence, such as in Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi” - “A cold coming we had of of it”. Writers, such as Shakespeare, TS Eliot and George Orwell, subverted the conventional word order and structure of sentences to be provocative and to amplify the intended meaning.

- Anaphora: The repetition of a word at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or sentences to emphasise an idea or feeling. E.g. Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. (Night, Elie Wiesel)

- Epistrophe or Antistrophe: The repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses or sentences.

- Anadiplosis: The repetition of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the next clause. E.g. I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. (“An Irish Airman Foresees

His Death”, W.B. Yeats)- Epizeuxis: The repetition of a word or phrase emphatically in succession with

no other words in between to produce a special effect. E.g. “Alone, alone, all, all alone,/ Alone on a wide wide sea!” (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

- Tricolon: The use of three parallel words, phrases or clauses. E.g. “ You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie.” (The Time Keeper, Mitch Albom)

- Anastrophe or Inversion: The reversal of normal, syntactically correct word order. E.g.

Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village though… (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost)

- Asyndeton: The omission of conjunctions, articles, and often pronouns for the sake of speed and economy. E.g. “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.” (Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad)

- Polysyndeton: The use of unnecessary conjunctions in a sentence. Can emulate a young voice or emphasise boredom. E.g. “Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.” (The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner)

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- Parallelism: Constructing consecutive sentences in a similar style in order to balance each other. E.g. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens)

Setting

The minutiae – the details that make a setting authentic Authentic references Verbal cinema: Open with an extreme close-up and then draw back to a

medium shot…use mise-en-scene to create a room or a place. Synaesthesia: colour, sound, smell… Imagery Pathetic fallacy and symbolism

Character

Complexity and paradoxes of life Qualities Shifting emotions Details Back story How they move and act in the setting Dialogue and voice Relationships Actions and consequences

Form and structure

Point of view, perspectives and voice – play with more than one perspective Striking opening that disconcerts, intrigues or engages emotively or

aesthetically THE CHALLENGES: DISCURSIVE RESPONSES

“Writing without the direct intention of persuading the reader, listener or viewer to adopt any single point of view. Discursive texts can be humorous or serious in tone and can have a formal or informal register” (NESA Glossary)

Discursive writing is exploratory. It takes an idea, a quote, an event, a person or a memory and explores this. It may end with a reflection and draws widely from many sources including the individual’s personal knowledge, understanding and experience. It can come in many forms, such as a creative non-fiction piece, a travel blog, a discussion essay, a speech or a personal essay. According to essayist Annie Dillard:

“There’s nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them. The material is the world itself, which, so far, keeps on keeping on. The thinking mind will

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analyse, and the creative imagination will link instances, and time itself will churn out scenes — scenes unnoticed and lost, or scenes remembered, written, and saved.”

Discursive writing can have the following features:

Explores an issue or an idea Can open with a quote or anecdote Personal anecdotes may be included Third or first person Can present multiple or different perspectives of an idea or experience Uses figurative language Uses factual information Draws upon real life experiences and often reflects key societal concerns or

raises significant questions Uses engaging imagery and language features Could begin with an event, an anecdote or relevant quote that is then used to

explore the idea A personal discursive piece is often deeply relatable provoking discussion Could end with a reflective resolution

You need to:

Find a compelling topic or idea to explore Start with a strong hook, such as David Sedaris’ essay ‘Untamed’

“When I was young, my family didn’t go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn’t afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.”

Show not tell Craft a thought-provoking, reflective conclusion that could leave the issue

open for further thought.

Planning a discursive piece

You begin by asking the following questions:

What was the event, idea or situation or who was the person? Why does the event, idea, situation or the person still linger in your

memories? What questions are provoked? How did you feel? How did you respond? What did it mean to you then? What does it mean to you now? Did it change the way that you perceive yourself, others or the world around

you?

Examples

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Wendell Berry’s essay “An Entrance to the Woods” - https://psych.utah.edu/_documents/psych4130/Berry_W.pdf

Annie Dillard's 'Total Eclipse' - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-dillards-total-eclipse/536148/

David Sedaris ’ “Untamed: On making friends with animals” - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/untamed-animal-friends

EB. White’s “Once More to the Lake” - https://genius.com/E-b-white-once-more-to-the-lake-annotated

George Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ - http://www.george-orwell.org/A_Hanging/0.html Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” -

https://home.ubalt.edu/ntygfit/ai_05_mapping_directions/ai_05_see/ad_total_eclipse.htm

Anna Ruta’s “A Tree Left Standing (inspired by Walden by Henry David Thoreau) - https://stuy.enschool.org/ourpages/writing_exemplars/english/Sophomore%20Exemplars/Narrative/A%20Tree%20Left%20Standing%20by%20Anna%20Ruta.pdf

Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of a Moth” (with analysis) - http://www.davidglensmith.com/wcjc/1301/PDFs/1209-woolf.pdf

“Snow Fall” The Avalanche at Tunnel Creel – multi-modal by John Branch; The New York Times, Dec. 20, 2012 - http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

Alex Preston’s ‘The Death of Privacy’ - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston

“The message seems to be that if you really want to keep something private, treat it as a secret, and in the age of algorithmic analysis and big data, perhaps best to follow Winston Smith's bitter lesson from Nineteen Eighty-Four: "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."

Here lies our greatest risk, one insufficiently appreciated by those who so blithely accept the tentacles of corporation, press and state insinuating their way into the private sphere. As Don DeLillo says in Point Omega: "You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." By denying ourselves access to our own inner worlds, we are stopping up the well of our imagination, that which raises us above the drudge and grind of mere survival, that which makes us human.

I asked Josh Cohen why we needed private lives. His answer was a rallying cry and a warning. "Privacy," he said, "precisely because it ensures we're never fully known to others or to ourselves, provides a shelter for imaginative freedom, curiosity and self-reflection. So to defend the private self is to defend the very possibility of creative and meaningful life.”

My ugly lovely town – an essay by Colum McCann

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http://www.stingingfly.org/sample/my-ugly-lovely-town-%E2%80%93-essay-colum-mccann

New York is a fiction of course, a construct, a story, into which you can walk at any time. All stories are love stories in some respect. Drunk and sober, high and low, up and down, this is my city. I came here first, almost thirty years ago, when I was eighteen years old, from Dublin. Naivety can overcome reality—I didn’t even mind the cockroaches that littered the floor of the tiny room I rented in Brighton Beach for $120 a month. I worked in Manhattan, a runner for a press syndicate, dropping off envelopes and getting sandwiches for the bosses. I came home every night on the D train, heroic with beer and cocaine and youth. I was either too stupid or too broke to get mugged.

I recall standing transfixed in the middle of the pavement one night, people stepping blithely around me as I stared up at the Time-Life building, watching the lights flicker on and off in the upper floors, thinking if there was nothing else in my life there would always, at least, be this. A gorgeous rubbish heap of a city.

I left after six months but returned twelve years later, in the nineteen-nineties, married. My wife and I had been living in rural Texas and in Japan. I didn’t like the city quite so much the second time around. I needed space. Stars were infinitely more interesting to me than ceilings. I began to crave the wilderness. I wanted to get away.

One afternoon I was in a downtown bar, Chumleys, famous among writers. I had spent my very last dollar, and when I got outside the rain was skittering down. It was a five-mile walk home. I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my head, and started walking quickly through the crowds—soaked to the skin, angry, pissed off, confused. I began to talk to myself. Nobody seemed to notice. I began talking louder, until eventually I was almost shouting. I barrelled on and then a strange sense of calm and relief washed over me. This is a fucking wilderness. Nobody cares. You can do whatever you want. Satori. I had shed skins. And I could now make whatever I wanted of the city. And since then I have. It has become my town simply because anything is possible here.

 There is something wondrous about walking through a city, any city, but especially this strange island on the edge of the continent. Perhaps my own favourite walk is the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge. There aren’t many feelings so acute as when I step in the early evening from the Brooklyn side of the river. Ahead lies Manhattan, the sun disappearing behind the rows of glass and steel. All that separates my feet and the water hundreds of feet below is a thin wooden plank. I become acutely aware of the sheer improbability of this: it feels as if I am floating in the air. The full architecture of human desire and folly is on display: so many dreams and brute realities are held in those skyscrapers.

To the south, the Statue of Liberty. To the north, the river bends towards Harlem.

In the middle of the wooden walkway I often get the sense of how overwhelming this city is and I wonder who built it and why. But I feel charged, electric, alive with possibility. I am, for this one moment, living the life of a nineteenth-century immigrant: and it is an instant when anything seems mesmerising and possible.

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There is an attitude in the city, a sort of swaggering that occurs in the head and the heart and the mouth. I don’t know of any other city in the world where you go and immediately feel as if you belong—and yet still also be true to your home country. I am a New Yorker and an Irishman and I see absolutely no contradiction in this. In fact, most of the city is an immigrant culture. You can walk through the borough of Queens on any given day and hear a dozen different languages being spoken on the same street—a true Babel.

And so it is a city not so much of America, as of the world: a mirror to the pure anarchy of the human condition. New York’s grandeur is that it has the unique ability to allow cultures to co-exist. And its beauty is on ground level—in the people.

One of the city’s enduring qualities is that it is characterised not so much by its ability to remember, as by the fact that it easily forgets. The great New York phrase is fuhgeddaboudit, three words (forget-about-it) sandwiched together in the hard music of the city’s accent. Most New Yorkers (while acutely tuned in to the grief of the World Trade Centre attacks) now simply want to move on. It’s a decade. Let it be. The national and international grieving all became very saccharine. New York used to be hated by the rest of America and in a strange way it was almost embarrassing that it was no longer reviled.

 The best place to find this humour is in the bars. It’s said that New Yorkers like to drink twice—once when they’re thirsty and afterwards when they’re not. I hate to admit that I’ve left my mark, my wallet, and my good sense in many of New York’s watering holes: Jimmy’s Corner, Milano’s, Swift’s, Puck Fair, Ulysses.

The fact of the matter is that New York likes to be rude. Shop clerks are notoriously blasé. Drivers are famously arrogant (the phrase ‘A New York minute’ is defined as the time it takes between a light turning green and the car behind you beginning to beep). But this maverick rudeness is also laced with humour. On my street there’s often a car parked with a bumper sticker that reads: ‘Jesus Loves You—everyone else knows you’re an asshole.’ And there’s a beggar on Seventh Avenue who says to passersby: ‘Hey, man, you got a quarter?’ Then he pauses a second and adds: ‘Or any multiple thereof?’

They say you know where you’re from when you know where you want to die. And while part of me would like to be scattered in Dublin, or the West of Ireland, or even Texas, or Mexico, I think I’d like most of me to be thrown into the wind over Manhattan and to end up wherever the breeze happens to take me—the corner of a room in the Chelsea, the dark of a Second Avenue bar, in the dust of the paths of Central Park, in the spin of a Coney Island dodgem car, in the grime that settles on the fire escapes of the Lower East Side.

In the end it hardly matters. Living here is what lifts the skin.

James Baldwin’s ‘A Letter to My Nephew’

January 1, 1962 https://progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew/

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James Baldwin's thoughts on his nephew's future—in a country with a terrible history of racism— first appeared in The Progressive magazine in 1962.

Dear James,

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort.

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember his falling down the cellar steps and howling and I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother's hand so easily wiped away, but no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be--indeed, one must strive to become--tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of war; remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. 

Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true. How bitter you are," but I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there. Your countrymen were not there and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocent check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives.

Well, you were born; here you came, something like fifteen years ago, and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they were not, for here you were, big James, named

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for me. You were a big baby. I was not. Here you were to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world.

Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. 

I know your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.

Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration." There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.

They are trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. 

Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one

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morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

You don't be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man's definition, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off."

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

THE CHALLENGES: PERSUASIVE RESPONSES

“Persuasive texts seek to convince the responder of the strength of an argument or point of view through information, judicious use of evidence, construction of argument, critical analysis and the use of rhetorical, figurative and emotive language. They include student essays, debates, arguments, discussions, polemics, advertising, propaganda, influential essays and articles” (NESA Glossary).

Cohesive and focused line of argument Deliberate choice of form, structure and language Rhetoric: repetition, tricolon, emotive language, allusions, rhetorical questions,

collective pronouns… Factual references Supporting evidence, such as references to experts or statistics Humour or satire Appeals to reason and emotions Does not have to be a speech or essay

THE CHALLENGES: REFLECTIVE RESPONSES

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“The thought process by which students develop an understanding and appreciation of their own learning. This process draws on both cognitive and affective experience” (NESA Glossary). “Consciously thinking about and analysing what one has done (or is doing)” (Bolton 2005).

Requires you to describe or explain, analyse and evaluate Retrospective Personal – first person Supported by clear analytical examples Makes connections between what you have learned and your practice Conveys a deep understanding and appreciation of what, why and how you

have written Use of anecdotal references, imagery or metaphor Explanation, description or justification of the use of specific language or

stylistic devices Connections between what you learn about writing and the writing that you

craft Self-awareness of the learning process May be objective and/or subjective

THE CHALLENGES: INFORMATIVE RESPONSES

“Texts whose primary purpose is to provide information through explanation, description, argument, analysis, ordering and presentation of evidence and procedures. These texts include reports, explanations and descriptions of natural phenomena, recounts of events, instructions and directions, rules and laws, news bulletins and articles, websites and text analyses” (NESA Glossary).

Primary purpose is to provide information Include reports, explanations and descriptions Features specific factual evidence Usually in the present tense Can use sub-headings Could use precise language and technical jargon

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DEVELOPING PRACTICE QUESTIONS

One question that may contain up to two parts. The question will require an imaginative, discursive, persuasive, informative or

reflective response.

Students will be assessed on how well they:

craft language to address the demands of the question use language appropriate to audience, purpose and context to deliberately

shape meaning

Question 1a.

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Part A: Criteria Marks Composes skilfully

Demonstrates skilful control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

9-10

Composes effectively

Demonstrates effective control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

7-8

Composes soundly

Demonstrates sound control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

5-6

Composes a piece of writing that attempts to respond to the question

Demonstrates variable control of language

3-4

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Attempts to compose a piece of writing that has minimal relevance to the question

1-2

b.

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Part B: Criteria Marks

Provides a perceptive

Provides a skilful

Demonstrates skilful control of language

9-10

Provides a thoughtful

Provides an

Demonstrates effective control of language

7-8

Provides a sound

Provides a sound

Demonstrates sound control of language

5-6

Provides a limited explanation of

Provides a simple

Demonstrates limited control of language

3-4

Attempts to provide some explanation for their choices 1-2

Question 2

a.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Part A: Criteria Marks

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Composes skilfully

Demonstrates skilful control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

9-10

Composes effectively

Demonstrates effective control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

7-8

Composes soundly

Demonstrates sound control of language and structure appropriate to audience, purpose, context and selected form

5-6

Composes a piece of writing that attempts to respond to the question

Demonstrates variable control of language

3-4

Attempts to compose a piece of writing that has minimal relevance to the question

1-2

b.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Part B: Criteria Marks

Provides a perceptive

Provides a skilful

Demonstrates skilful control of language

9-10

Provides a thoughtful

Provides an

Demonstrates effective control of language

7-8

Provides a sound

Provides a sound

Demonstrates sound control of language

5-6

Provides a limited explanation of

Provides a simple

Demonstrates limited control of language

3-4

16 | P a g e

Attempts to provide some explanation for their choices 1-2

17 | P a g e