Charles’ Blog

In order to be successful in English, your ability to read and understand is paramount, as well as your ability to write creatively and craft excellent essays. Unfortunately, students are often bombarded with texts such as Shakespeare that seem impossible to grasp, some students plainly hating reading altogether. I, for one, prefer to analyse film texts rather than written texts, much to the annoyance of my English teachers Reading and writing are what earn you those well deserved marks in exams and assessments. Given this, how can you improve said abilities?

First, we need to pinpoint exactly what  it is we are aiming to improve.

Reading

What do we need to do when we read? Look at words; they are just a collection of letters grouped together and spaced apart to create meaning. Look at sentences; they are just a collection of words from which you read, and just as you scan the letters to read words and draw their meaning, you scan words to make meaning of sentences. The difference with sentences, however, is that a bunch of different meanings have to come together to create a bigger meaning. As you are reading these words, what do you do? You see the letters grouped as mentioned and draw meaning from the clusters – the words. Chances are you’re doing so at a pretty fast pace at that.

This is the key to reading: the ability to process and understand words fast.

Think about how you are reading now. Chances are you are reading text in blocks, rather than word by word. This is because your brain is so used to reading it’s almost as if you can predict what is to come and be satisfied when you see it there as you skim it over. Taking this a step further, we can move on to reading in paragraphs and eventually pages in order to improve our capabilities to read effectively. Of course, your ability to process at a slower pace is also alright – it’s that it is more effective to read fast to improve in English, because reading fast allows you more time to reflect on what you have read and develop ideas about your texts.

A good idea to use for getting used to reading is visualising what is happening in the story to the best of your abilities. This would probably also make your story/article/whatever more enjoyable to read, another bonus to effective reading. This is also good for those of you like me who enjoy sitting on our fat lards to get information sent to us without any self effort.

Writing

There are two ways to write in English: creatively and analytically.

Creative Writing

This is something that a lot of people like to do and a lot of people abhor -  a task that requires two things of you: an imagination and a vocabulary.  Writer’s block is a term that I feel is being thrown around way to often these days. It refers to the writer’s inability to draw ideas out to write about anything. Everyone has something to write about, it’s just that no-one writes often enough to know it. This is why imagination is important: you can take a anything, be it an event in your life or what you ate for breakfast, and beautify it to create an appealing piece of art. The more unique the ideas you write about, the more marks an examiner would probably be willing to award you.

To beautify your ideas, you need a vocabulary – it is inevitable. But this comes naturally as you read! As long as you strive to define words you do not understand, you will constantly build your vocabulary. Some will swear by doing crosswords, among other newspaper style word-puzzles, to increase the number of words they know. Although this is an excellent idea, these puzzles can appear to be very overwhelming at first, with very abstract words that you don’t often use appearing often in each addition. The plus side to this is that crosswords are very consistent in repeating several words, or waiting for several puzzles before the word you solved so long ago reappears.

How do you go about syncing imagination and vocabulary? The magic word is imagery. Imagery is a dire step in the creative writing procedure that some either under- or over-cook. You need to express what is happening in the creative writing task – what perspective is the piece in? Where is the piece set? How do the characters react to certain things? Overall, it is what makes the piece worth reading.

I’ll post an example of an… extract of a short story written by my little brother and jazz it up with the power of imagery:

Brother:

His mother brought his medicine so he’d get better. he [sic] drank his medicine and he had to go to the toilet. The boy’s mother asked why? [sic]

My Edition:

He heard the footsteps of his mother resonating through the confinements of the grey walls. As she entered the room, he noticed that she was carrying a strange brown vial, no doubt a punishment for his getting sick. He drank the foul smelling liquid and his bowels turned with anger. He needed to go. Badly.

“Why?!” his mother exclaimed, half chuckling at the unnecessary question she had asked.

Notice that more emphasis had been put on tactile and visual imagery. In addition, I’ve enforced olfactory and aural lightly, but I skipped the gustatory imagery, letting the smell of the medicine do the talking. Suddenly, the piece has become more engaging to the reader and they may better relate to the situation at hand. This is often known as SHOWING and not TELLING. The problem with this is that it can get out of hand at times, making the writing tedious. There is always rooms for scarcity and allowing for the reader to guess what you are trying to say. At the same time, leaving too much guesswork can work against you. It will come naturally with practise.

Analytical Writing

Mainly essays, a word that strikes fear into the hearts of many students. I have no personal experience with bad essay writing, so I can’t tell what the issues actually are, but I can provide what I do when I write my essays.

• Introduce your argument and your points.
• Provide body paragraphs in as logical an order as possible, providing a topic sentence, an example, some expansion on how the topic sentence and the example are related and why the information you have provided altogether are related to the argument you have introduced.
• Conclude by summarising all points, not mentioning anything new and concluding on your argument.

Analytical writing can’t be done without a thorough knowledge of the topic you are to write about, which is why effective reading is so important! It is well worth noting that vocabulary is of dire importance in analytical writing also, and the way you articulately string words together to create proper meaning really imposes on your marks. How insightful your argument is is also another factor. How do you make your arguments insightful? I think that perhaps your ability to create an insightful argument is a function of how well your ability to think laterally is.

Although this little post has been lightly touched up on, I believe even a little consistency will take you a long way. Never giving up is the first step to achieving goals