Descriptive Writing Year 11

Planning Learning Objectives To appreciate the necessity of planning in a descriptive essay To understand the elements required in a descriptive essay plan To practise planning a descriptive essay

Starter Small group discussion: What makes a good descriptive piece of writing? Dos and Don’ts

Success Criteria Style and Accuracy Writing is consistent, stylistically fluent, linguistically strong and almost always accurate; has a sense of audience. Consistently wide range of appropriate vocabulary. Subtle and effective sense of audience; appropriate use of varied sentence structures. Spelling, punctuation and grammar almost always accurate. Content and Structure Content is complex, sophisticated and realistic. Overall structure is secure and the constituent parts well balanced and carefully managed. Many well-defined and developed ideas and images create a convincing, original, overall picture with varieties of focus.

How do we ensure this? Planning! We have to know where we are going so that we can guard against the horror of writing a story! See my little joke: horror – haunted house! Haha!

Advantages of Planning You can work out the different phases of the essay. You can work out where your imagery is going to go and what it might be. You can plot where your feelings will come in. You can register where you may have to guard against the dangers of narrative story- telling. You can monitor if you will build to a climax. You will never have to endure that horrific moment when you finish a paragraph and have nothing to say next.

Let us decipher a task (b) You walk into a room and there is an atmosphere of anger and embarrassment. Describe the scene, paying particular attention to the ways in which the atmosphere is made obvious to you. [25] Atmosphere presented well (not anger but certainly awkwardness and embarrassment)

Comparing settings

Think about planning the task What would you want to include? In what order? Think: Setting Physical descriptions Costume Weather Minimal dialogue Facial expressions Sound Smell This is crucial, remember, as the sequencing of your ideas is very important in scoring the best grades. But perhaps the most important advice is… SHOW, DON’T TELL!

Same deal as Monday Your job is to now plan out a descriptive piece using this task. Don’t forget to sequence carefully and think about where you will insert key examples of imagery, sentence structure and impressive vocabulary. You should give yourself 15 minutes.

Homework Complete Descriptive writing on A4 paper. You only should give yourself 50 minutes maximum.