Reflections

Reflections are not about beating yourself up for not being good enough, they are intended as a way of identifying where you need to improve. And – most importantly - to provide you with personalised targets to work towards. No one should finish a task and be completely happy, but you should be satisfied that you’ve done enough – for now, which is why my reflection questions are always a combination of positive and negative elements, ‘I did well with this,’ and ‘I could do better with that.’

You need to have done at least 3-4 of the prompts from this blog, more would be better, because then you can pick up on patterns of things that you struggle with and balance them against the things you do well.

Now, here are some of the more common targets that I have set for my students, based on their work and reflections. I’ll give you a few tips on how to improve your work for each one.

First – Use of correct and ambitious SPAG

Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar are basic, but often overlooked elements of English that people continue to struggle with into adulthood. If your teachers have noticed that you’re struggling then I would expect them to provide you with targeted work in order to practice your skills. But that doesn’t mean you can’t look to your own improvements.

1. Read a lot. This is a universal method of improving your understanding of SPAG (or anything else for that matter.).
2. Identify your weakness. Whether you have problems with commas, colons or semi-colons, you need to know what it is and target it. Look up the particular uses of and rules around that punctuation mark and practice using them correctly. Use them in your English work and ask your teacher to comment on how you can improve.*
3. Read your work aloud. Knowing where the pauses and stops naturally come in your work will help you learn where the punctuation needs to go, and practice will teach you whether it should be a comma, colon, semi-colon or a stop.

*The same thing goes for spellings and grammar, if you keep track of the words you struggle with you can pick up on the patterns that you get wrong - i before e, double letters, th or f, magic e. Likewise, grammatical errors come from not being able to separate your everyday language from academic register or standard English. Using colloquial terms can SOMETIMES be interesting in creative writing, but not in an academic setting. When writing a formal answer or essay it helps to think of yourself as a newsreader to put your writing in the proper form.

Second – Use more ambitious vocabulary

Sometimes you just can’t think of the word, or when you read it back you realise you’ve used the same word 2-3 times in the same paragraph. It looks awful, and is frustrating to mark because your teacher can see the ideas developing, but just can’t mark it up because you’re not demonstrating good or ambitious vocabulary. Or, and this is worse, you have picked up on one word, your pet word, and that’s the only descriptor that occurs to you.

Professional writers fall into this trap. It’s not great, but it’s ok to have a pet word when you’re writing a book and you’re producing thousands of words. However, a good choice of word is wasted if you’ve used it three times on the same page, or even the same paragraph.

1. Read widely, and challenge yourself. I know it’s easy to just pick the unchallenging books to read, but I believe that we should try and push ourselves a little every week. At minimum you should be reading 1 classic book every year – whether that’s through school or on your own. You may find it beneficial to create small book clubs with your friends or family to read the same text and then Discuss the author’s techniques, their choice of language and SPAG.*
2. Read the dictionary – Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous – Once a week look at the dictionary, and pick out 6-8 Nouns, Adverbs or Adjectives that you don’t immediately recognize. Write them on post-its and keep them in your diary or around your workspace until you can find a way to use them correctly in your writing – in the correct context, don’t just randomly throw them in. You should ask a friend or family member to quiz you on both spelling and meaning. Once you have used a word and you’re satisfied that you know what it is and that you can use it in the future, throw the post-it away. Review them weekly, and you will gradually build up a really good vocabulary.
3. Problems with boring word** choices? Try this exercise. Pick a boring adjective, ‘Small’, for example. Write a list of as many synonyms as you can in 5 minutes. You should have about 10-15. Then look up your word in a thesaurus and add 10 more. Now, you have a list of 20 words that all mean ‘small,’ but which is the most small? Re-write your list from the most small to the least small, there is no wrong or right here, these are your decisions. Now stick this list in the back of your English book. If you do this on a regular basis you can build up a useful wordbank to refer to when you need an interesting word. Also, the exercise of making these lists will become second nature, and you will regularly be looking for better words as you write.

*A Classic book is anything written before 1940. Look online and you'll easily find lists of the 100 books you should read before you're 20, but I would advise asking your teacher to suggest something that is suited to your reading and understanding level - some challenge is good, but you can't go from Jacqueline Wilson to Tolkien or Tolstoy without trying the steps in between.

**Boring words include, small, big, old, young, hot, cold, wet, dry, bad, good... I'm sure you can find more.

Trouble Starting

Many people run into writer’s block from time to time. The blank page can be terrifying. There are a large number of block-breaking activities you can try, I'm sure I will introduce more in future videos, but here are some of my favourites.

• Build your plan – using the 5-box table I introduced last week, or one of the other techniques I’ll introduce, set out the bare bones of your story.

Who? Who are the characters?	Where? Where are they? Setting?
What? What do the characters want?	But… What is the challenge?
Vocab/Descriptive Choices – Interesting features you want to add

Once you have the skeleton of your story set, you can keep adding details to develop your ideas until you have enough major points to put things together into a narrative plan.

• Sometimes actually starting can be the hardest thing, and all the preparations in the world just can’t make that first line appear on the page. If I’m this blocked I start by using one of these lines,

-         My story is set in…

-         I want to say…

-         The most important part of this story is…

I find that using these starters greases the wheels and begins the flow of words. I expect that my first paragraph isn’t the best, but using these starters means that I don’t feel bad about deleting it when I come back to edit, because it was never intended to be in the final piece in the first place. It takes the pressure off.

• Stream of consciousness – like the technique above, this one allows you to get a rolling start. Draw up your planning table, then write down whatever comes to mind about the task and after a paragraph or two you’ll find that you’re telling the story after all and you need only write the rest of the story then revise and edit the opening to fit.

Self-Reflection is an important part of developing your writing and your creative skills. Sometimes we find it difficult to see the positive, but it’s always there and you should celebrate it when you do because balance is important in everything.

If you have identified any other targets you want help with, drop them in the comments and I'll include them in my next tips video.