Descriptive Writing - Part 2

23 Fevereiro 2016, 10:00 Hilda Alexandra Prazeres Eusebio

Students read aloud and analyzed the following descriptive texts:

  • Excerpt from Barbara Willard's The Sprig of Broom;
  • Excerpt from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol;

  • Excerpt from Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities;

  • Excerpt from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.

Students then got into groups to prepare for their first peer teaching session.  Each group chooses a descriptive text to anazlye and presente to the class.  The group must ensure that they are familiar with all of the challenging vocabular and must address the following questions:

  1. What is the dominant mood or atmosphere of the text;
  2. what, if any, senses (sight, sound, smell, etc.) are evoked in the text;
  3. if the text is poetry: what does the writer want the reader to experience; if the text is a jornal/diary, what is the writer experiencing;
  4. how does the writer make us experience it/convey their experience? what words do they choose? how do they arrange them in the text? how does the sentence structure and punctuation effect us? etc.

There are 7 texts to choose from and these are:

  • The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5:
    1. Wednesday 2 October;
    2. Sunday 6 October;
  • The Jounrals of Sylvia Plath:
    1. "The Earthenware Head";
    2. Thursday morning: February 20;
    3. Friday night, February 21;
  • Poems by Anne Michaels:
    1. There is no city that does not dream;
    2. Last Night's Moon.

Students will be given an hour next class to prepare.  Presentations/peer teaching will be done in the second hour of the class.