Dec 10, 2012 Showing NOT Telling

Homework: Show don't Tell worksheet

Today in class we worked on SHOWING vs. TELLING when writing.  To practice, we started out class by writing in our journals about our favorite holiday memory using our five senses.  What were you seeing?  What were you feeling?  Hearing?  Tasting?  Smelling?  Using your five senses to describe something gives really vivid and rich descriptions which is what we want for our reader.  The more descriptive we are in writing, the more the reader can visualize and relate to our story.  

We reviewed what it meant to show versus tell our reader what were talking about.  For example, instead of saying..... 

                        James was angry.

Show us how he was angry.  Say....

James, his face beat red, took a gray rock off of his desk and hurled it toward me.  Stunned, I froze as the stone whizzed past me and exploded on the wall behind me.  

I didn't have to say that James was angry in the second sentence for you to know that he was angry, because I showed you by describing what he looked like and what he was doing.  

Powerful words often make sentences more descriptive as well, so we came up with lists of powerful words for more common words like happy and sad.  The list is here.  

Finally, to wrap up I handed out the homework which is a worksheet to help you practice writing descriptive sentences.  Students need to take the telling sentence they give you (ex: The boy was lonely) and write a showing sentence instead (ex: The boy sat by himself in a corner with a sad expression on his face and no one to play with).  There are 20 sentences but you only need to choose 10 to redo.