Formal writing can be enjoyable

 

Teaching can be a romantic business in that you may always seek to clothe what would appear to be a cumbersome task in appealing terms. In this sense, I am an incorrigible romantic.

My focus is yet again writing for a language exam at an advanced level, particularly when the candidates are teenagers and still struggling with formal writing in their native language.

It is not very often that a teacher gets the opportunity to be playful about it but if you look out you might come across texts – newspaper articles, poems or even advertisements –which, if properly used, might provide excellent material for introducing or practising language or register useful in formal writing tasks.

The following was recently published in The Guardian.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oEfOAzprqaMgquQjbfkMMPU9nUT6DmLL/view?usp=sharing                 

It is a facetious exchange between someone versed in bird singing and an imaginary reader who responds to the information provided.

There is enormous potential in the text in various respects: witty repartee, colloquial language and a number of crucial issues to boot – music, birds, drugs, using animals in experiments, sounds during the coronavirus quarantine. So you could challenge your students by asking them to use different expressions from this dialogue to keep a conversation going.

(you don’t say, just think, really, I wonder if …, don’t say)

Now the question is how one could exploit the text in order to elicit more advanced writing. You could ask your students to write a serious article based on this dialogue, which will be published on a science website. This will involve leaving out all irrelevant details (summary skills), reordering the important facts in a way which the reader will find easy to follow (organisational skills)and employing different linguistic devices from those used in the original text.

It is exactly those differences in style that you need to focus on and either elicit them from the students or point them out to them so that they can use them in an appropriate way in their article.

I am supplying a sample here which I wrote for my students. I would make sure I won’t give away any of this before the students have tried their hand at the task. You will see some of the devices used highlighted.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XC3d5IpvSHk8oNtpdqCSx1oWDIRFHLu5/view?usp=sharing

 

Conclusion: writing can be less of a bore for students if we, teachers, only tried harder.