Category Archives: Leaving Cert Paper 1

Paper 1 advice and examplars.

Descriptive Writing Tip 2

Posted on January 13, 2014 by evelynoconnor | Comments Off

Use adjectives.

The reader needs details so that they can picture the number/quantity, size, shape, weight, colour, brightness, texture, condition, sound, smell, taste, speed, temperature, age, distance, time, origin, location, emotion towards or opinion of the thing being described.

Take this sentence: “The car raced through the town”

I’ve got a good verb – “raced” but otherwise I know very little about either of the things being described – the car or the town. If I add a few adjectives, suddenly these nouns come to life!

“The tiny battered Mini raced through the sleepy seaside town”

You’ll notice I changed “car” to “Mini” so you could picture an actual make and model – “car” is a pretty crap noun because it’s a common noun but other than ‘engine, four wheels’, it doesn’t give you a specific picture in your mind.

For a vast list of adjectives, click on this link.

WARNING: Too many adjectives can make your writing worse, particularly when you select over-used adjectives such as big/small, happy/sad, good/bad, fast/slow. Writing which draws attention to itself – or rather which draws loads of attention to itself by being overly flowery – is known as purple prose.

THIS IS NOT A COMPLIMENT.

PURPLE PROSE IS BAD!

You’ll annoy the reader because they’ll feel like you’re showing off and you’ll probably slow the pace of your sentences to a crawl as well.

Here is an example of just enough adjectives to keep the flow of the writing and at the same time offer us a clear picture:

“I could see a blue light flashing in the distance. My head was throbbing and when I lifted my swollen hand to my temple, sticky, wet blood smeared my fingertips. A low moan of pain was just barely audible amid the screaming sirens and the screeching whirr of the chainsaw that was going to cut me out of the train wreckage. It was only later I realised that I was the one moaning. Everyone else was dead”

Here’s an example of purple prose – add in 11 more adjectives (the ones I’ve underlined) and suddenly it goes from descriptive & well-paced to incredibly dragged out and intensely irritating!

“I could see a vivid blue light flashing in the far-off distance. My heavy headachy head was throbbing and when I lifted my swollen sore hand to my aching temple, sticky, wet blood smeared my shaking fingertips. A low moan of intense pain was just barely audible amid the screaming sirens and the screeching whirr of the vicious chainsaw that was going to soon cut me out of the twisted train wreckage. It was only later I realised that I was the one moaning. Everyone else was dead”

Some writers prefer a very minimalist style to keep a fast pace in their writing – something like this:

“I could see a blue light flashing. My head was throbbing. I lifted my swollen hand to my temple and blood smeared my fingertips. A moan of pain was just barely audible amid the sirens and the whirr of the chainsaw that was cutting me out of the train wreckage. It was only later I realised I was the one moaning. Everyone else was dead”

So, you don’t HAVE to include loads of adjectives to write descriptively…

Comments Off on Descriptive Writing Tip 2

Posted in Composing, Teachers

Tagged adjectives, description, descriptive writing, tips

Perfect Paragraph Project

Posted on January 10, 2014 by evelynoconnor | Comments Off

Recently I’ve come to the very obvious conclusion that if a student can’t master the art of writing a really good paragraph they’ll never master the art of writing a really good essay.

This is such an obvious statement I’m almost embarrassed to type it publicly.

Anyway, I’ve started the Perfect Paragraph Project with my second and third years in an effort to help them master the art of the perfect paragraph so that they have the tools necessary to write a perfect essay.

Below are the advice and the example I’ve used to help them.

Topic sentence = introduce the idea you’ll discuss in this paragraph – this idea must be directly responding to the Q

Body sentences = 6-8 which go into more detail, using relevant quotes & examples to prove your point(s)t & offer your opinion(s).

Final paragraph sentence = connect what you’ve just said back to the question that was asked (but don’t repeat yourself. Think of this sentence as the sentence which shows what you have learnt / what you now understand).

Once we had established the basic rules for writing a perfect paragraph, I asked them to select a question – whatever one they wanted from their Christmas test – and I there and then created the paragraph below, talking through my thought process as I typed.

They could see what I was doing as it was projected up onto the whiteboard but I told them NOT to take it down as I didn’t want them to be distracted from the process. Then I left the sample paragraph on the board and they were then given 15 minutes to then create their own perfect paragraph. As I’m correcting them I’m trying to differentiate for the different difficulties (what a mouthful!) students are having and the hope is that practice will make perfect until everyone in the class is confident that they can write a perfect paragraph! That’s the theory anyway…

Sample Perfect Paragraph

In many ways I think I would not like to have Romeo as a boyfriend, mostly because he is an obsessive romantic who is in love with the idea of being in love. For example, Romeo maintains that he is love-sick and heartbroken following Rosaline’s rejection. One minute he believes that “love is a smoke made with a fume of sighs” yet the next minute he is proclaiming undying love for Juliet. In my opinion it would be difficult to believe anything he says because he is so fickle. Secondly he’s very superficial – he loves Juliet not for who she is but for how she looks, which is clear in his dramatic pronouncement “Did my heart love til now? forswear it sight, for I ne’er saw true beauty til this night”. This soppy, over the top attitude towards love is not my style – if he were my boyfriend I’d spend my time rolling my eyes at his compliments and wishing he would stop being such a drama queen.

PLANNING YOUR INTRODUCTION = first, brainstorm 4 or 5 ideas. Next, number these ideas in the order in which you intend to discuss them. Now, write your introduction – you basically offer your response to the question asked, then give a brief list of the things your essay will discuss. Basically each idea in your list then forms the basis of each paragraph.

JUNIOR CYCLE ONLY (you need 6 – 8 paragraphs for senior cycle)

Sample Introduction

In many ways I would not like to have Romeo as a boyfriend. He is very dramatic about love, he changes his mind continuously, he can be impulsive and violent and he is a very moody individual. However, there are moments where I do like him, particularly when he risks death to be with Juliet.

NOW I KNOW HOW THIS PERSON WILL STRUCTURE THEIR ESSAY – paragraph one will discuss his attitude to love, paragraph two will discuss his impulsive, violent side, paragraph three will discuss his moodiness & multiple proclamations that he’ll commit suicide if he can’t be with Juliet and paragraph four will attempt to offer some balance by discussing some of his finer qualities, including his bravery and his determination.

Conclusion checklist:

Recap your response to the question (re-phrase – don’t repeat introduction word for word)

Focus on how you felt & what you learnt

Sample Conclusion

Thus, although Romeo is brave and determined, on balance I would not like to go out with him. He is too dramatic, too sincere, too romantic, too moody and too impulsive for my liking and I suppose what I have learnt about myself from answering this question is that I would prefer someone altogether calmer and more grounded as a boyfriend.

Comments Off on Perfect Paragraph Project

Posted in Composing, Discussions, Junior Cert, Teachers

Tagged how to write a paragraph, paragraph structure, perfect paragraph

Descriptive Writing Tip 1

Posted on January 7, 2014 by evelynoconnor | 6 comments

Verb choice matters.

Take this sentence: “He walked past the window”

Now imagine I substitute a different verb – I take out “walked” which doesn’t tell me a lot about HOW he walked, it just offers me a bland fact – he was walking. I can’t picture HOW he walked – but if I change the verb, look at how the picture in your head changes:

He crawled past the window

He staggered past the window

He danced past the window

He skipped past the window

He bounced past the window

He strutted past the window

He shuffled past the window

He stumbled past the window

He tip-toed past the window

He strolled past the window

He ambled past the window

He crept past the window

He scampered past the window

He glided past the window

He charged past the window

He lurched past the window

He trotted past the window

6 Comments

Posted in Composing, Junior Cert

Tagged description, descriptive writing, tips, verbs

Descriptive Essays

Posted on November 23, 2013 by evelynoconnor | Comments Off

Up to recently, students felt relatively confident that they were choosing from amongst four genres in the composing section of the Leaving Cert English Paper 1 – you wrote a

short story
personal essay
newspaper/magazine article or
speech/debate

Occasionally you’d have the option to write a series of diary entries, but this has more or less disappeared from composing and is more likely to appear as a QB.

Anyway, descriptive essays have started to make an appearance on the paper, a fact which I am bloody delighted about! To my mind, they are a half-way house between the short story and the personal essay. If you’re good at descriptive writing, this is a great option to choose instead of the short story because you don’t have to worry about creating a plausible ‘plot’. As long as you can describe vividly, you can potentially get full marks here. With personal essays, you will often (nay should!) write in a descriptive way but you’ll also feel the need to reveal your personality; the essence of who you are as a person. So the descriptive essay is once again a less prescriptive option, because you’ve don’t have to worry about laying bare your soul.

For a full and detailed discussion of what exactly descriptive writing is and how to do it yourself, click on this post “Language of Narration & Description“. Meanwhile, here are the two descriptive essay titles that have come up so far – they’re very open and very doable imho.

2013 Write a descriptive essay based on a variety of glimpsed moments.

2011 Write a descriptive essay about twenty-four hours in the life of a town or city.

Here’s a link to a descriptive essay I wrote a while back, called ‘fragments from a lost weekend‘. I deliberately used lower case letters in the title to try and reflect my sense that this was a series of throwaway fragments; and also perhaps the idea that my experience was minor and insignificant by comparison to what my friend suffered in losing her dad.

Some would argue it’s a short story; others that it’s a personal essay. I think it’s both and neither. I think ultimately I was trying to write a descriptive essay which would capture the void which gapes open in a person’s life when they lose a parent.

Comments Off on Descriptive Essays

Posted in Composing

Tagged description, descriptive essays

Personal Response – A Brief History

Posted on November 20, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 7 comments

Personal response encapsulates the absolutely sensible and sound notion that you should not just analyse intellectually but also respond emotionally to texts. Sadly, however, this then morphed into the somewhat happy-clappy notion that you should be ready, willing and able to explicitly relive these emotions when writing about them months (or sometimes years!) later. This is a bit silly really, imho, because when the initial emotional response to any event, good or bad, is over, what we’re left with is the opportunity to analyse it logically and try to figure out what it all meant.

Who was it that said “the unexamined life is not worth living” ? I think it was Plato. Well, to my mind, the unexamined text – be it a poem, a play, a novel or a film – remains a wonderful, oftentimes deeply emotional experience, but without the intellectual rigour of analysis, it remains an opportunity lost for deeper understanding of who we are and how we live our lives as human beings.

By the by, I think ‘personal response’ was an attempt to convince teachers and students alike that how you feel as well as what you think when you encounter a story matters (and it does!). I think it was an attempt to encourage independent thought, originality and debate in classrooms instead of the ‘sage on the stage, top-down, sit in your seats & bow before my superior wisdom’ approach which (we are told) dominated (still dominates?) so many classrooms. I’m not convinced demanding personal response necessarily achieves this but it’s a worthy aim nonetheless. Finally, I think ‘personal response’ was a way of giving two fingers to the grinds schools and the revision books industry who were pumping out generic passive voice academic content for students to learn off so they could ‘fake’ understanding of their texts.

But whatever the intention, the plan soon backfired and the problem soon emerged, particularly in the studied poetry section, that students were basically learning off ONE pre-written personal response essay on each poet. These were essays which they may or may not have written themselves – oh the joys of having an older brother or cousin or sister who could pass their essays down through the generations, like family heirlooms to be treasured and polished and re-used ad-infinitum! If they didn’t have the good fortune to get said essays from family members they could get them at revision courses or in books or, best of all, they could learn off their TEACHER’s personal response and pass that off as their own (sure weren’t you only doing justice to the ecstasies of enraptured joy and pain and suffering your poor old teacher went through every time he read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Sure you could never respond with such passion and despair and, God help him, that level of personal response deserves an audience and sure he can’t sit the exam again, he’s surely pushing fifty at this stage and a fifty year old man sitting the Leaving Cert English exam – for the fifth time – just for the craic – is just downright sad).

Personal response became shorthand for knowing exactly what would come up on the exam and therefore not having to do any critical thinking on the day, but rather a rote learn and regurgitate exercise that everyone was pretty happy with thank you very much. Until some genius in the State Exams Commission realised that the whole thing had somehow turned into a dumbed down touchy feely personal response nightmare that was encouraging students to fake personal engagement but which was – in most cases – letting them off the hook of having to actually think for themselves in the exam.

So then it all changed again, around 2010, and the airy-fairy personal response questions started to disappear off the exam papers and more demanding, much more focused and academically rigorous questions reappeared.

And that’s where we’re at now.

If the question demands a personal response, get in there, get stuck in, show that you have opinions and you’re not afraid to express them and they belong to you – I I I all the way captain! But remember that close analysis of the text, using a sophisticated vocabulary, is always required for Honours Leaving Cert English. And above all else, at all times, ensure that everything you say is responding directly to the question you were asked.

7 Comments

Posted in Comparative, Composing, Studied poetry, Unseen poetry