Children should be encouraged to read their work aloud, a Scots writer told the conference.
Janet Paisley said writing is about communication and needs an audience. A poem is “like a piece of sheet music”, she said.
Ms Paisley suggested one way to get children to “break the rhyming habit” was to encourage the use of short words prompted by the questions “what can I see?”, “what sounds can I hear?” and “what can I smell?” Such “sensual images” can communicate the experience of a place and can brighten a piece of writing because “we discover the world through our senses not our intellect”.
