Goal for the day: To understand the difference between scene and summary in storytelling.
We started this day going over the calendar for the course until the end of October. This will change and this DP is still the place to look for assignments, but the calendar gives an overview of where we're headed.
There are three primary assignments for students to have in the front of their minds: "Telling a Story," "Writing Reflection," and "Writing to Truth Revision." I explained these assignments and how these will take us until October 6th. On this day, we'll move into a full week of writing poems in class and talk about poetry craft. After this, we'll finish the month doing critiques of each other's work.
I also reviewed the point distribution for the class so students could see how much each assignment is worth in the grand scheme of things. I also passed out the rubrics that I am using to evaluate student writing. We haven't covered everything on the rubrics but we will.
We then moved to talking about "scene" vs. "summary" in storytelling. We played a game of Advance-Expand-Color to illustrate that scene and summary is really about how we manage time within our stories.
Scenes show things happening from a moment-to-moment perspective, either in the outside world or inside the character. Scenes expand time. They raise and answer dramatic questions. A scene is usually over whenever the question raised at the top of the scene is answer (or when the question changes).
Summary collapses time. Summary describes what happens. This is similar to "telling" in the "show don't tell" aphorism but is not exactly the same. An author can "tell" what happens to moment-to-moment, though most often scenes involve dialogue and more detailed description of action.
We looked at Ernest Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" to look at how he moves from scene to summary. Stories are much like the illustration above with dramatic scenes connected by lines of summary.
Students spent the last ten minutes working on their pieces as I passed back the "Writing to Truth" assignment with comments along with additional work.
Assignment for Wednesday, September 24th
Keep working on assignments
We started this day going over the calendar for the course until the end of October. This will change and this DP is still the place to look for assignments, but the calendar gives an overview of where we're headed.
There are three primary assignments for students to have in the front of their minds: "Telling a Story," "Writing Reflection," and "Writing to Truth Revision." I explained these assignments and how these will take us until October 6th. On this day, we'll move into a full week of writing poems in class and talk about poetry craft. After this, we'll finish the month doing critiques of each other's work.
I also reviewed the point distribution for the class so students could see how much each assignment is worth in the grand scheme of things. I also passed out the rubrics that I am using to evaluate student writing. We haven't covered everything on the rubrics but we will.
We then moved to talking about "scene" vs. "summary" in storytelling. We played a game of Advance-Expand-Color to illustrate that scene and summary is really about how we manage time within our stories.
Scenes show things happening from a moment-to-moment perspective, either in the outside world or inside the character. Scenes expand time. They raise and answer dramatic questions. A scene is usually over whenever the question raised at the top of the scene is answer (or when the question changes).
Summary collapses time. Summary describes what happens. This is similar to "telling" in the "show don't tell" aphorism but is not exactly the same. An author can "tell" what happens to moment-to-moment, though most often scenes involve dialogue and more detailed description of action.
We looked at Ernest Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" to look at how he moves from scene to summary. Stories are much like the illustration above with dramatic scenes connected by lines of summary.
Students spent the last ten minutes working on their pieces as I passed back the "Writing to Truth" assignment with comments along with additional work.
Assignment for Wednesday, September 24th
Keep working on assignments