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Welcome back to school!

In response to one of my newsletter mailings last year, I received an email from an elementary school principal. She wrote:

Any thoughts on teaching "engaging beginnings"? I think the one word with an exclamation point or the question that begins, "Have you ever...?" is being overused by my young authors.

I emailed back with a few ideas, which I thought I'd share here, as my first newsletter for the 2008-2009 school year; the start of a new school year seems like the perfect time to talk about engaging beginnings!

When teaching engaging beginnings, it's a challenge to move beyond pat approaches, along the lines of the one-word-with-exclamation-point and rhetorical question; however, experimenting with a variety of these approaches can help young authors find their voice and their own way to use a "standard" lead-in with some freshness.

Here are some approaches you might ask your students to try:

1. Start with a brief line of dialogue from a character (usually the main character). The dialogue should immediately place the reader in the scene, introduce the main character, and perhaps even hint at or introduce the conflict of the story. For example:

"Leave me alone!" Sally shrieked at her mother as she stormed up the stairs to her bedroom.

Here, the conflict is immediately apparent: Sally and her mother have hit a bump in the mother-daughter road. But what exactly is Sally so angry about? What exactly is her mother doing that is so infuriating? We hope the reader is engaged enough to read on and find out!

2. Start with a sentence that introduces a clear action, often one that suggests strong emotion, but also one that leaves the reader with some questions about motivation. As with the line-of-dialogue approach, the goal of this approach is to drop the reader right in the middle of the action, and encourage the reader to turn the page to find out more. For example:

Sally yanked her chair out from under her desk, sat down with a thump, and began to scribble furiously.

Here, we hope the reader feels Sally's sense of urgency, as she "yanks" her chair, "thumps" into her seat, and "scribbles furiously." But why is Sally feeling this urgency? Is she excited about something? Is she angry? Why is she feeling this emotion? What has happened? What is she writing about? Again, we hope the reader is engaged enough to want to learn the answers to these questions!

3. Start with a sentence that sets the scene with an initial clause, then gives an action in the present or past progressive tense. Once again, this approach places the reader in the scene, and makes the action of the story very immediate. Here I'll take an example from one of my books:

On a pale grey night with a bright full moon, Witch was dressing for a bash.

Action tends to be compelling—especially for the age group for which I write. Using the past progressive tense make the action immediate; my hope is the reader will be swept right into the action of the story, and will want to turn the page to see the action continue.

4. A final approach to engaging beginnings is a bit more sophisticated. With this approach, the idea is to pare away the less-engaging beginning that a writer might come up with in a first draft, and get to the "true" beginning of the story. In journalism, this is referred to as "not burying your lead." In other words, the story should jump in right where the reader is interested, rather than hemming and hawing its way to the interesting stuff.

Of course, a first draft often includes a lot of hemming and hawing; with a first draft, we just want to get words on paper, and those words are not all gems. So, we revise!

For example, take the following as the first few sentences of a first draft:

Sally didn't like being told what to do. She especially didn't like it when her mother told her what to do. So when Sally's mother told Sally to change her clothes before going to a friend's birthday party, Sally was furious. "Leave me alone!" Sally shrieked at her mother as she stormed up the stairs to her bedroom.

For my final newsletter of the 2007-2008 school year, I'd like to refer you to several new resources posted here on my website:

December 2007/January 2008

One of the single most important “rules” for strong writing is one that I did not learn until I began my professional writing career: “Show, don’t tell.”

When I was in school, writing instruction focused on adjectives—or, at least, I remember adjectives as a primary focus. I vividly remember one lesson, in 6th grade, in which a teacher suggested that we strengthen our writing by changing sentences such as, “Her eyes were kind,” to sentences such as, “Her eyes were exciting.”

Even as a relatively undeveloped writer, I recognized several fundamental flaws in this lesson.

First, her suggested edit did not strengthen the existing meaning, but changed the meaning. Yes, in editing, sometimes we do want to change the sense of an initial draft. But more often, I think, we want to maintain the existing meaning, but find a way to express that sense or meaning or thought with a bit more oomph.

Secondly, replacing an adjective that does not mean “exciting” with one that does mean “exciting” does not make the writing more exciting. In other words, the fact that “exciting” means “exciting” does not necessarily make “exciting” an exciting adjective for exciting writing!

Though I recognized these flaws in the argument for the kind-to-exciting edit, I had no information at the time about what would make a better edit—so I spent my 6th grade year, at least, editing my writing by replacing kind-style adjectives with exciting-style adjectives. I’m sure this helped develop my vocabulary, and in that regard was not a complete loss, but I doubt it did much for the quality of my writing.

What I learned much later is that strong writing has little to do with “exciting” adjectives and much more to do with strong, action verbs. To strengthen writing, “show” your reader through the use of strong, action verbs, rather than “telling” your reader through the use of weaker linking verbs plus adjectives. “Her eyes were exciting” tells. A simple (albeit rather cliched) example of a stronger sentence that shows: “Her eyes sparkled.”

The quality of writing instruction today seems much improved from the days when I learned to upgrade adjectives. I hear teachers talk about strong verbs; I see lists of “juicy verbs” hanging in classrooms; some teachers even use the specific phrasing, “show me, don’t tell me.”

As a writer, I love to see this focus on verbs rather than adjectives. Nevertheless, I continue to see students struggle with showing, rather than telling—and a tendency to want to upgrade adjectives, rather than changing sentence structure to use strong, action verbs. When I present writing programs, I talk about “show, don’t tell,” then challenge students to rewrite a sentence such as, “John was angry,” to show rather than tell. The first responses I hear are almost invariably adjective upgrades or adverb insertions: “John was furious.” “John was outraged.” “John was extremely angry.”

“But show me!” I say. “What do people DO when they are angry?” I stomp across the room. I cross my arms over my chest and scowl. I clench my fists. Soon the students get it: “John stomped!” “John clenched his fists!”

This newsletter ties in with my last; as I wrote in October, children seem to struggle with verbal description of what they see; children likewise struggle with showing in their writing, rather than telling. Strengthening the verbal-visual connection is a pervasive theme when it comes to the development of strong readers and writers!

One exercise I might suggest for strengthening students’ ability to revise their writing to show rather than tell: After students write a first draft, ask them to review their writing and circle every instance of the verb “to be” (remind them to look for both present and past tenses: am, is, are; was, were). Next, ask students to rewrite each sentence that contains a circle, using a strong action verb to show rather than tell. Ask students to share their edits, and see what happens!

As I visit schools, I notice that primary-age students struggle with description.

In one of my books, about three-quarters of the way through, I read the line, “But Cat was busy, spooking Sprite.” I immediately hear a chorus of voices: “Who’s Sprite? What’s a sprite?” I say to the children, “Let’s see if we can figure out who Sprite is by examining the pictures. To ‘spook’ means to startle or to frighten. Look at the pictures. Which character do you see being spooked by Cat?”

The children are good at identifying the correct character: “Up there! Up there!” But when I say, “Identify the character by describing him in words,” they struggle. Even with prompts (e.g., “what does his nose look like?”), they often continue to struggle with a verbal description (e.g., they gesture with their hands to physically indicate a long nose with a curl on the end). It seems so clear to me to say things like, “He has a long nose with a curl on the end. He has wings. He has funny little feet with curled-up toes. He has a long tail. He has big hands.” But this is not so clear to the children.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that describing something seen requires a transfer of visual information (in the right brain) to verbal information (in the left brain). Regardless of the neural pathways, transfer of visual information to verbal information is, of course, a skill critical to strong writing! And, of course, the reverse transfer, verbal information to visual, happens on the reader's side of a piece of writing; we always encourage children to “make a picture in your mind” as they read. To develop both strong readers and writers, therefore, we need to encourage children to strengthen the information highways in the brain that allow for fluid conversion of visual information to verbal, and vice versa.