10 English – Creative Writing inspired by The Outsiders - Creating a voice for your character

A lesson designed to teach students to:
• Vary their sentences to create a unique character voice.
• Make intentional choices about spelling, punctuation and grammar to create the voice of their character.
• Show rather than tell.
• Include some implicit meanings along with explicit ones.

It includes:
A description of the following types of sentences and their effects: short abrupt sentences and long flowing sentences. A reminder about sentence types: simple, compound and complex.

There is an activity – read the example and identify the sentence type which has been used and its effect.

Writing activity – a sentence is displayed on the board. They have to write it to show different emotions (in the voice of specified characters from The Outsiders).

How to experiment with punctuation / spelling to make a character’s writing feel realistic or emotional. Looking at a diary entry written in the voice of Sodapop. Identifying the author’s choices and their impacts.

How to show rather than tell. Specific nouns; vivid adjectives; strong verbs, similes, personification. How to edit a telling sentence to make it a showing sentence.

Activity – Highlight the explicit information (telling) in yellow and the implicit information (showing) in blue

Writing activity – turn this telling example (from Randy) into a showing example.

Extended writing activity - using the passage as inspiration, write a journal entry from Randy’s point of view.

A PPT designed for use in a 10 English unit who have studied the novel The Outsiders in the previous term and now are using it as inspiration for a creative writing assignment (either a gap/silence short story or a series of journal entries from the perspective of a character other than Ponyboy).