Introduction to Structure

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Из курса от партнера Commonwealth Education Trust

Writing for Young Readers: Opening the Treasure Chest

827 оценки

Commonwealth Education Trust

Writing for Young Readers: Opening the Treasure Chest

827 оценки

This course is for curious students and aspiring authors with a passion for writing for young readers. Participate in a dynamic online community of writers as you experiment with your own writing and develop your voice. This course will guide you with a combination of video lectures, online readings, peer reviews, and guest appearances from world-renowned children’s authors. As you work through the writing exercises, you will give and receive feedback from your peers and gain tools and techniques for improving your writing. During this course you will identify stories that matter to you, explore cultural significance and boundaries, and shape your identity as a writer; become familiar with standard elements of narrative (character, setting, plot, theme, language, dialogue, point of view); reflect on your own work and practice essential self-editing skills; see the different ways in which words and art interact, and the possibilities of longer narrative forms; come away with practical insights into publishing options; and create a plan for pursuing your enthusiasm for writing. By the end of the course, you will have ten to twelve extracts of writing that you can develop into a portfolio. Join a dynamic community of many voices from around the world. Find inspiration in your own voice, heart, and place so that you can tell the stories for young readers you’ve always wanted to tell.

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Structure

We’ve covered qualities of writing that make it appeal to an audience – its form, its genre, and its strong personal voice. Now we’ll move on to some structural elements that are key to holding your writing together. We’ll start by looking at character and setting, then move on to plot and theme. Finally, we will focus on language. Language can really bring your writing to life by adding a layer to your characters and setting and by giving your plot a good pace. This is the last module where we look at creating new writing. In the next two modules we’ll focus on editing your work and getting it published.

Introduction to Structure4:08

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David Hill
Author
Maria Gill
Author
Alex Alexandrou
Dr

The other modules so far on this course have looked at your writing identity.

How you can use your life or culture for material to write about.

What viewpoint you can write for.

How to organize your life as a writer and at genre.

Different types of writing, topics to use.

Audiences to write for.

In this module, we'll discuss structure.

You can apply structure to your writing to help you give it shape and

build it up with interesting paths so that other people will want to read it.

Think of a film you like, or a TV program you enjoy.

Take a moment and think of any one.

Why do you enjoy it?

Probably it's got a good story.

Exciting or interesting things happen in it.

The story keeps moving.

There's a satisfying ending.

There may be clever changes and surprises.

The actors are probably good.

And make you believe in the people they're playing.

You'd like to know these people.

You want to find out what happens to them.

They're different from one another and they may change during the story.

You like some of them.

Perhaps you enjoy not liking some of them.

The Fillmore TV program may have a message that makes you think or

that you agree with about looking after others for

example, or being brave, or caring for the land you live on.

And it may happen in an interesting time and place.

A village or town nowadays, that reminds you of one you know.

Or a planet in the distant future that is so strange, it really amazes you.

Now, think of a book or a story you like.

Why do you like it?

Probably for the same reasons you enjoy the film or TV program.

A good story, interesting people, places and times, maybe a message of some sort.

That's what we'll be talking about in this module.

We'll be discussing five wonderfully useful writer's tools.

First, we'll look at characters, the people in your story, poem, or

play, and what you can do to make them interesting.

We'll look also at setting, the place and

time where things happen in your poem or story.

We'll look at plot and theme.

When we're looking at plot, we'll talk about what makes a good story.

We'll look at the events that happen in a story, and

how these events are put together.

For theme, the message that people will take away from your story,

we'll explore ways that you can make your story meaningful

without pushing the theme onto your reader too much.

And finally, we'll look at language.

The words, sentences, and conversations in your writing.

So, if you were discussing the tools used by the author of a book you like,

you might say something like this.

This book had a really fast moving plot.

There were exciting new events happening throughout the story.

I enjoyed the way we didn't learn the truth about what had happened

until the very last page.

The characters were realistic,

though I couldn't always remember which of the hero's brothers was which.

There seemed to be a theme about how family members usually help one another,

even after a big argument.

The sitting on the remote island was well described, and

it was interesting to read how people lived in those places 50 years ago.

The language of the book was clear and easy to read, though the way they talked

in island dialect was a bit hard to understand sometimes.

These five tools, character, setting, plot, theme,

and language, help give your writing an effective structure,

a shape that will make people want to read your work.

They're really useful writer's tools, and they'll definitely help with your writing.

We'll start in our next video with character.

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