Thurs Oct 2

NEW  Writing ASSIGNMENT SETTING: You are going to write about a favourite place using the 5 senses. As you describe the place, I want to you to use words that create visuals, sounds, tastes, and a sense of touch. The idea here is to write creating an atmosphere or feeling. 

You may need to build a fictional story around this place or simply begin describing it. In this assignment students are to focus on the elements of setting ( time, place, description)  using the senses and the concept of show not tell. Be specific instead of saying the red car, try the 1970's red corvette, instead of running shoes try his purple air Jordan's.

  Criteria:

• use show not tell
• use the senses, sight, smell, touch, sound
• 3/4 of a page minimum, typed
• hand in to teacher for editing, then fix up
• use specific language

Example of SHOW VS TELL

“Show, don’t tell” is using descriptive language to allow your reader to experience the story world, rather than explaining it to them with exposition. It allows the reader to visualize what the writer is communicating. For example, saying a room was cold is “telling.” Mentioning the frost on a windowpane or the thick socks your characters wear is “showing” the cold, but without saying it.

LINK to further reading: Setting article: more info

Link: get some help here

Example:

from "The Old House at Home" (1940)

by Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996)

McSorley's bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes. To the left is a row of armchairs with their stiff backs against the wainscoting. The chairs are rickety; when a fat man is sitting in one, it squeaks like new shoes every time he takes a breath. The customers believe in sitting down; if there are vacant chairs, no one ever stands at the bar. Down the middle of the room is a row of battered tables. Their tops are always sticky with spilled ale. 

When describing a place in fiction, think about the sounds, smells and other sense details that distinguish it from others. Here is Dickens describing the industrial city of Coketown.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black … It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.

AND from Harry Potter: The first several chapters of the book take place at the Dursleys' prim house on Privet Drive. The Dursleys' home may look polite and regular, with its "tidy front garden"  and its inhabitants' emphasis on behaving just like everyone else, but that doesn't make it a nice or welcoming place to live. In a way, it has just as much darkness and unhappiness as you might expect from a magical landscape. Nephew Harry is forced to live in a "cupboard under the stairs"  while the son of the house, Dudley, enjoys two bedrooms to himself. The Dursleys' house might look cheerful from the outside, but inside Harry sees only bleakness.