Monthly Archives: September 2009

Key Tips for Formal Writing

I recommend the Studyit site all the time but I don’t know how many of you have checked it out. It has lots of useful material on it – for instance have a look at these key tips for Level One Formal Writing:

* Use examples of formal writing to model your work on.

* Understand the focus of the task and who you are writing for by underlining the keywords.

* Plan your time wisely – don’t spend all your time deciding on a topic. See Choosing a question

* Write about something you are familiar with and have an opinion about.

* Plan your writing carefully so it has a clear introduction, middle, and conclusion.

* Indicate a new paragraph by leaving a blank line or indenting the first line of the new paragraph.

* Have a series of 4–5 paragraphs discussing the main point. Use a clear structure for each paragraph of your essay.

* Include and incorporate reliable statistics, facts, examples, and opinions.

* Use formal language and tone throughout.

* Use a wide range of vocabulary and language features accurately and appropriately.

* Use rhetorical questions and/or minor sentences as a special feature rather than in every paragraph.

* Read your writing ‘aloud in your head’ at least once. Listen for any weak or inappropriate words, informal language, run-on sentences, or punctuation errors.

* You will not be allowed to use a dictionary in the examination so use words you know how to spell.

* Check that you have used the correct spelling of a word that may sound like another (there/their/they’re, here/hear/hare).

* Check each new sentence starts with a capital letter.

* Read from a range media such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio to keep up to date with current issues and opinions to help your writing.

Lord of the Flies Revision

On the William Golding site there are materials for students. I have put an extract below on the character Simon. Go here to read more.

Golding has marked Simon out as different – he’s epileptic and is the one who dramatically faints as the choir wait for orders. He stands out in other ways: look at the description in “The Sound of the Shell”: “The boys round Simon giggled….”

  • Simon has a confidence which enables him to go off on his own
  • He is a reliable helper – “Simon. He helps.”

Look at what Ralph says about him when talking to Jack. Clearly Simon LIKES to go off on his own: look at the passage where he goes in to his secret hiding place in “Huts on the Beach”. Check also the passage where he returns to this place in “Gift for the Darkness”. Remember that he volunteers to cross the island alone with the message for Piggy.

  • Simon has a level of understanding which is almost other-worldly:

“I don’t believe in the beast.” Crucially Simon says “… maybe it’s only us”.

Another important passage in which Simon is shown to have this strange knowledge is the one in which he and Ralph are talking (“Shadows and Tall Trees”), and Simon says “I just think you’ll get back all right.” It is worth looking closely at the conversation that Simon has with The Lord of the Flies at the end of “Gift for the Darkness”. Look at Golding’s use of language here.

  • Simon discovers the simple truth about the monster/ beast; he possesses the detail of its true nature – a casualty from the grown-ups’ war from which the children have been evacuated. As Simon frees the lines of the parachute from the rock, he gains the knowledge which could free all the children from fear.
  • Look again at the death of Simon and think about IRONY. Simon has the crucial, urgent knowledge that he runs to deliver to the others: but he is not allowed to deliver it.

Simon is a fascinating character, then. Golding shows Simon as having knowledge about the beast at two distinct levels (1) it is in us, and (2) it is merely a dead airman whose parachute  is entangled.

William Golding Quotes

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies

We need more humanity, more care, more love. There are those who expect a political system to produce that; and others who expect the love to produce the system. My own faith is that the truth of the future lies between the two and we shall behave humanly and a bit humanely, stumbling along, haphazardly generous and gallant, foolishly and meanly wise until the rape of our planet is seen to be the preposterous folly that it is.

WILLIAM GOLDING, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1983

Fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.

WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies

Quotes on Evil

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil.

SOPHOCLES, The Sons of Aleus

The whole gamut of good and evil is in every human being, certain notes, from stronger original quality or most frequent use, appearing to form the whole character; but they are only the tones most often heard. The whole scale is in every soul, and the notes most seldom heard will on rare occasions make themselves audible.

FANNY KEMBLE, Further Records, Feb. 12, 1875

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organisation. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organised along the lines of the Mafia.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR., The Sirens of Titan

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

SIGMUND FREUD, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

No one becomes depraved all at once.

JUVENAL, Satires

Apathy and evil. The two work hand in hand. They are the same, really…. Evil wills it. Apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn’t care as long as it’s not personally inconvenienced.

JAKE THOENE, Shaiton’s Fire

Apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hand.

ANONYMOUS

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.

MAX BORN, as quoted in Judith Sherven’s The New Intimacy

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

EDMUND BURKE

Fairly examined, truly understood,

No man is wholly bad, nor wholly good.

THEOGNIS OF MEGARA

Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves we collude with it through our apathy.

J. K. ROWLING, speech, Jun. 5, 2008

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

BLAISE PASCAL, quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations

Schindler’s List cinematic techniques

Schindler’s List portrays an incredible story of human suffering, agony, and death alongside incredible human courage, tenacity, hope, and endurance. Director Steven Spielberg was ability to capture graphically the nature of ruthless, mindless cruelty and savagery perpetrated on the Jews under the Nazi regime.

If you would like to recap the cinematic techniques used in the film, go here.

What is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time about?

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.

“This is a murder mystery novel,” Christopher explains a few pages further on. A fan of Sherlock Holmes stories, Christopher decides to investigate the poodle’s murder and turn the story into a book of his own.

Christopher is quite good at puzzles, at maths, and at remembering. He is, however, entirely incapable of delineating among the various grades of human emotion on the scale between happy and sad, which makes for a curious, if not altogether perplexing perspective. The narrator may not recognise them, but emotions lurk behind virtually every clue he uncovers. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an emotional roller coaster that is well worth reading.