Its back to school

Charles Dube

SWIFTLY the school holidays have gone by and it’s strictly back to school. Many learners have not been on holiday, what with the demand of holiday or extra lessons. These are the in-thing nowadays. The motto is: if you can afford join them. It is suffice to say these holiday lessons have helped many learners achieve good grades in the public examinations. On Tuesday schools will be a hive of activity teeming with learners.

All is set for those who write O and A-level public examinations in June. Most of these we assume are almost ready to sit their examinations. These have been sweating it out throughout the short holiday period. Those following this column will have realised that I tried to help O-level learners on free composition writing. I realised that some learners take certain issues for granted when it comes to composition writing.

Learners were reminded on small things like ignoring simple punctuation and writing fragmented sentences. There is general neglect of using full stops and commas to mention just a few. There is expert advice given to learners to perfect the use of the English Language. In a nutshell, they should pay particular attention to sentence construction, punctuation, tenses, prepositions, paragraphing and spellings. Spellings, tenses, and paragraphing are still to be dealt with and in greater detail on these pages later on.

Learners should read a lot of work written by others. After marking learners’ work the teacher can make use of the work presented by the learners to correct general and individual mistakes made by learners.

Some learners present good work which can be read in class to motivate others. Common mistakes can be noted in some learners’ work and corrected immediately. Composition answers should also be numbered. I have realised that some learners have problems on situational essays. This is another area which I was taking for granted thinking learners have no problem in it. In this area questions come in various forms.  Here is a distinction between a situational and guided composition.

One expert says a situation composition gives an account of an event(s) or experiences happening to you or someone else at a particular time and place. The main task is to write what happened at that particular time and place. Learners are advised to take note that this type of composition, like the descriptive composition is restrictive. They only give an account of events for that particular time and place and nothing else.

When writing a guided composition, you are given information or instructions to incorporate into your writing. Thus, you are given a skeleton and you have to add some flesh. While many learners have no problem following this instruction there are some who totally fail to follow this instruction which at face value appear very straight forward. The fail to answer the given question. On top of that they fail to use the given guidelines. Above all, they fail to incorporate the given information.

Learners writing their examinations still have some days to work and correct themselves on these errors. They have to follow the pattern of guidelines. Learners should not write anything that is outside the given guidelines. Note that other guided compositions have the following instructions: Write a short story that ends with one of the following sentences: (a) I would never have believed that I had such courage or (b) I blamed myself for being dishonest.

Having looked at composition writing from the above angles I believe it is worthwhile to give hints on how to improve your story: vary sentence lengths — short for suspense and long sentences for description. Use powerful verbs, for example roared not said: stumbled not went, include descriptions such as: thunder boomed and lightning flashed in the dark sky. Include alliteration to make descriptions more memorable, for example, the rain roared and the lightning leapt and show how your characters feel: for example, his heart pounded like a drum.

Learners could check their language usage. For example, you can ask yourself: Have I used the past tense all the way through? Have I used dramatic connectives like, suddenly; at that moment to mention just a few. Have I used time connectives to tie the story together? For example, when, while, after? Have I used place connectives to show where things happen like, in the cave, over the hill, in the tree house?

How do you create a character to improve your composition? Choose a name for your character or would a nickname sound interesting? Describe one or two details so the reader can “see” your character. For example, freckled or mottled face, blue jeans or scruffy. Describe the feelings of your character, for example, angry, sad, lonely, excited, jovial, mean, jealous, brave, calm, silly, hungry, tired, elated to mention a few.

I hope these points will help learners ready themselves for the examinations and generally improve their English language performance in other spheres. 

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