Mrs John's Groups (7,8,12 & 16) - work during her absence Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th October 2007

I will be absent from school on Monday 8th October and Tuesday 9th October.

Work for Monday's class

Please continue the work on creative writing by considering poetry. Also make sure that you have ready to hand in on WEDNESDAY 10th October the introduction to your portfolio.

INSTRUCTIONS
Read the poem by Roger McGough, Let me die a young man's death by following this link

Please look at the following questions either together or singly.

1. Identify any analogies, metaphors or similes used by the poet
2. How does the poet use rhyme and rhythm in the poem
3. What is your opinion of the poem? Why?
4. Why do you think the poet wrote the poem?

Make notes and be prepared to discuss in the next writing class.

Read Chapter 35 of Writing in English: A coursebook for Caribbean Students (Simmons-McDonald et al). You may also find the information on this site of interest.

Work for Tuesday

Please continue our work on Verbal Communication.

INSTRUCTIONS

Before you attempt this exercise please read

Chapter 6 of Communicating Today (Zeuschener) especially page 99 (Speaking and Writing) and

• Section 1 (Chapters 1 to 3) especially p 29 to 31 (differences between speech and writing) and Chapter 2 of Writing in English: a course book for Caribbean Students (Simmons-McDonald et al)

1. Consider some of the differences between speaking and writing indentified by the authors of Communicating Today and Writing in English. Make a list of the characteristics they note for both speech and writing.

2. Read the two passages below. One is speech and one is writing.

3. Indentify the characteristics of speech compared with writing in the two passages. Use your notes you made for activity 1 to help you.

This should be prepared for the class on Wednesday 10th October. Please prepare in a form that can be submitted.

Passage 1

One of the things that happen to people who get the Nobel Prize is that they get a lot of media attention. Many interviews. So many that I begin to feel now that I have lost the capacity for spontaneous thought. In need the questions. So I thought I would begin like the old fashioned comedian. The man to whom things happen on the way to the studio.

Well then. Something happened to me on the way to Stockholm. The strap of wrist watch broke. And for some surreal moments I found myself looking at my watch on the floor of the plane. This is no metaphor. Here is the strapless watch. What did it mean? What was the awful symbolism? The fact is all through Nobel week I was to be without my wrist watch.

Source: Sir VS Naipual’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10 2001 http://www.nobelprize.org/


Passage 2

V. S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice. Singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models he has wrought existing genres into a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance.Naipaul’s literary domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not least, England. Naipaul is Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.

Source: Press release from http://www.nobelprize.org/