GCSE English

Making your writing more effective

This guides covers a couple of techniques that
should greatly improve the quality of your
writing (and thus your grades). Both methods
are easy to learn and put into practice. The first
will help to make your writing more accurate and
effective. This is it:
After you have written a few sentences, stop
writing. Now, read back your work out loud,
as if you were an actor reading for a part in a play. Your voice must be
naturally animated and expressive, and sound as unself-conscious as you can
make it.
The trick is to forget that it was you who wrote the words and to hear them
almost as if you were listening to someone else. Doing this distances you
from your own uses of language and what you hear, you will, naturally, be far
more critical of. The technique means you will see and hear any errors in the
writing spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. It will pick up, too, the
deadening effects of over-long sentences and help you to re-draft the
writing into something that will be more compact and clear as well as crisper,
livelier and more effective.
Soon, this out loud process can be silenced and internalised with the
actors voice existing only in your head. This is when the technique is at its
most useful works also for exam writing.

Now for some practice.

You are going to write a very short but atmospheric story, one that uses
description to help the reader feel a sense of the place you are writing about. You
can choose your own title, or call the piece Waiting. It will need to be a
maximum of 1 side in length (250 words) and grip your reader from the first
paragraph. This story beginning has many of the qualities needed (see if you can
detect the sensory description as well a plot hook):
Who doesnt like a trip into town on a Saturday night? Cities are full of people, full of
cars, full of the hustle and bustle of life. And Leicester is no exception. I was born there
so I can speak from personal experience. But something was different last Saturday. There
were more people, more cars and much more hustle and bustle than I had ever seen or
heard before.

All stories are structured as narratives. This means that each sentence is
consequent upon the one that went before: every word from your narrator,
every piece of description and every element of dialogue must add to what
the reader already knows from what went before. Each piece of a narrative is
developing the particular over-arching idea of the piece your controlling idea.
Thus the reader must never feel that what they read is inconsequential or
padding. Your work must contain no waffle, no excessive flabby adjectives, no

weak or stray words, no wasted dialogue, description or ideas. In short, it will be

an example of lively, compact writing.
Now for the second method. If you forcefully s-l-o-w down your
writing, you will produce a more effective text one that affects your
reader more deeply. Heres one way but later you adapt it to your
own.
1. Your first sentence must start with an ing word (called, in grammar, a
present participle). Make sure the sentence is complete.
2. Your second sentence must contain five or fewer words.
3. Your third sentence must use a semi-colon (;).
4. Your fourth sentence must be a rhetorical question.
5. Your fifth sentence needs to begin with an adverb (many adverbs are
adjectives + -ly).
6. Your sixth sentence must contain a simile (an as or like comparison).