At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
- Select a title for narrative or descriptive composition;
- Develop appropriate outline for a narrative or descriptive composition.
Duration: 45 minutes
Activity: Teacher leads students to select titles of essay and develop outline for the selected titles. Teacher asks students to access resources online and report on findings.
The teacher tells the students that it is very important that one should have a clear and accurate conception of the subject of the essay before you attempt to write on it-what exactly it is and (equally important) what it is not. Some subjects are so simple that you can scarcely make a mistake about them; but some others require to be further looked into to define them exactly. For example, “The Uses of Computers”. The subject is not how computers work. Nor is it the history of computers. Yet some students, carelessly reading the subject, might easily take up a large part of their essay with such topics. In a short school-essay there is no room for irrelevant matter. You have to come to the point at once, and start away with the subject.
The subject in this case is the uses of computers in offices, in industries, in aircraft, in spacecraft, etc. It is, therefore, very necessary that you should define the subject clearly in your own mind, or you may waste much time and paper in writing on more or less irrelevant matters.
Now you should be ready to decide on the line of thought of the essay, i.e., the logical order in which you can arrange the points you have selected. The necessity of thus arranging your thoughts according to some ordinary plan cannot be too strongly insisted upon. Without it, the essay will probably be badly arranged, rambling, disproportioned, and full of repetitions and irrelevancies.
Bearing your subject definitely in your mind and with your purpose clearly before you, sketch out a bare outline of the main heads, under which you will arrange your various materials in a natural, logical and convincing order – from a brief Introduction to an effective Conclusion.
Filling in the Outline: – Having thus mapped out the main points with which you are going to deal, arrange the ideas you have collected each under its proper main head, rejecting all those not really relevant to your subject or which simply repeat other thoughts, and taking care that each really belongs to the division in which you place it. You will now have a full outline, which is to be a guide to you in writing the essay. But this is not the essay, but only its well-articulated skeleton. You must now clothe the skeleton with flesh, and (most difficult of all) breathe into it the breath of life, before you can call your production an essay.
Specimen of a bare outline on descriptive essay like “Elephant”
Bare outline
- Description.
- Habitat and food.
- How and why hunted.
- Strength and intelligence, making elephant useful to man.
- Its different uses.
Now we must fill in this bare outline by grouping the various points under the main heads. In doing this, we may find occasion to modify or alter the bare outline, and additional details may suggest themselves.
After a round of brainstorming, teacher makes clarifications.
