From Picture to Prose? You need a PLAN!
- Aug 7, 2017
- 4 min read
One of my favourite quotes
"Teacher, I don't want to plan. THERE IS NO TIME TO PLAN DURING TEST!" Ash lamented. She was resisting the idea of planning her essay before writing.
"Cher, cannot lah! Really no idea how to plan! And where got time to do that during the exam?" Sam added.
PLAN.
The very word evokes fear and trepidation among some of my students, whether primary or secondary. For them, the idea of planning an essay under time constraint is a luxury they couldn't afford.
"However, if you don't plan, YOU PLAN TO FAIL," I said to them.
Some students might get away with zero essay planning at primary level, hoping, by a stroke of luck, they might scrape through with a razor-thin margin and land in the "PASS" range. Some bet on their spontaneity and their content/task fulfilment to carry the day. However, their standard of writing would become stagnated over time, with no visible reward of a higher score in writing.
"If you have been failing in your Continuous Writing all these years, and you know you haven't been planning your essays for all these years, then why do you still want to do the same thing--that is, refusal to plan--and hope for a better result? Years of experience should have told you, without planning, you will just fail the next Continuous Writing!" I told my students.
For as long as I have been teaching English Language Arts, I realise, training the students to plan for their essays is critical for their success, ie. PASS, and PASS WELL.
As of this writing, my O level students have gotten into the habit of planning their writing, especially Situational Writing. And they are seeing significant improvement in their grades.
Over here, I shall take the Creative Writing topic I had worked with two of my Upper Primary students to demonstrate the importance of planning. The topic is as followed:
Creative Writing Question designed by Ms Te-O
For readers who have been following my posts, you would realise that this seems remotely familiar. Yes, it is the pictorial version of my short story, "Feather, Wood and Dog"!
However, I did not want my students to have preconceived notion of what I had expected from them. Therefore, I hid my story from them and asked them to try to create one of their own.
But, firstly, I wanted to see their plans.
Student A's Plan One and my feedback (in green)
Upon reading my student's plan, I addressed her lack of an attention-grabbing narrative arch. The topic was about Conflict and Reconciliation. So, she could afford to follow the traditional narrative arch.
To assist her further, I re-arranged her leads (aka points) into different boxes, and labelled each box according to the different components in the narrative arch.
After which, she reworked her plan and showed me.
Student A's Plan Two and my feedback (in red)
I provided her some feedback and stressed that now, given this simple (ie. not dissipated but focused!) plot, she could start to think how to embellish her characters, James and Jane. I have my rule of "3's".
"For every character, you come up with three credible adjectives or adjectival phrases. including the adjectives for the cat, the dog and the bird."
She worked on it again and came back with her first draft.
Student A's First Draft
And that was her Draft One. After giving her some feedback, I told her to work on her second draft.
As for another student, his first plan ran the risk of changing the question topic. The lack of a credible conflict was not working for him. So I provided him some ideas to work on in plan two. I also addressed his grammatical errors such as pronouns and tense.
Student B's Plan One and my feedback (in colours)
Student B's Plan Two and my feedback (in colours)
Student B's Draft One and my feedback (in pink)
Apparently, the student had some ideas but he could not think out of the box and approach his writing in a different way. He was locked in a recount mode. Therefore, I shared with him the idea of beginning his composition with a dialogue.
At this juncture, I must say that most students do have some ideas on how to write. But years of schooling and fear of failure have caused them to lose their confidence in writing. Very often, re-building their confidence to express themselves on paper is a long and lonely road--for the teacher. It draws every ounce of resource within the teacher to get the student write just one paragraph. Having said that, the outcome is rewarding. When my student can, at least, emulate what I have given him, that itself is a breakthrough. It reminds me of a verse in the Holy Bible:
So, for the students who are struggling with writing, fret not. Learn from a good teacher and you will get there.
In other words, when I tell you to plan your writing, SHOW ME YOUR PLAN.
Happy Planning!
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