BABY TALK TO CREATIVE WRITING

Those who read novels and those who write novels will know that a sentence in a novel can be written in millions of elegant ways. Those of us who teach writing in Papua New Guinea have long been aware of the great difficulty of lifting students up from baby talk.

FAMILY POSITIVE LIVING - AIDS HOLISTICS: THE CRAFT OF ...

2 days ago ... FAMILY POSITIVE LIVING - AIDS HOLISTICS. faith, hope ... They do not write
baby talk as we see in high schools these days. They often ... I will now take a
piece of creative writing and highlight the sweet sentences. At times ...

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Where do we start? Perhaps the start is in the small sentences that show how an idea can be moved along in a sentence. We write any sentence to show sequential action with cause and effect. So that may be the starting point.

We can not expect students to read novels and absorb the patterns of writing. But we know that the skilled writer in any part of the world is successful in absorbing the elegance and craft of written patterns. But to teach students, we start at the start.

We start with the most basic sentences and ask students to write a sentence with the same pattern. We will teach by Mastery Learning. We hope that the readers and writers among the students will open their minds to the expressive power of language.

In the teaching of English to PNG primary and high school students, there will be about 300 sentence patterns to be developed into Mastery sequences.

He went to town to buy food.

She bought soap to wash the clothes.
They dug a garden to grow potatoes.
The man opened the door to let us in.
I go to school to learn to read and write.

He opened the door, went inside and sat down.

She cleaned, cooked and ate the food.
They cleared the ground, dug the garden and planted seeds.
He ate food, read the newspaper and went to work.
The old man sat, smoked his pipe and told us stories.

Cold and wet, the boy stood in the rain.

Tired and hungry, the child waited for his mother.
Happy and laughing, the children played games.
Gentle and caring, the mother looked after her sick child.
Sick and weak, the child lay on the bed.

Looking out the window, I saw the man.

Opening the door, I went inside.
Laughing loudly, he told us a story.
Standing by the road side, he saw a snake.
Sitting under a tree, the children played games.

Having eaten the food, the man went to work.

Having finished the work, he went home.
Having cooked the food, the woman set the table.
Having arrived early, the children stood and waited.
Having given his opinion, he sat down.

This last pattern is similar to the Tok Pisin
" Kaikai pinis, em i go long wok".

Even mastery of the above patterns will elevate the standard of an essay
from primary school and lower high school students.

In the Mastery Learning design, there can be hundreds of such patterns to be given to students grade by grade. These will not turn students into writers of novels but will give a broad experience of crafting logical and beautiful sentences. This is more than they are being given in the present education process.

More to come.