Reading for Style

This week we have added a new page about reading for style.  Much of our time as literature teachers is spent trying to develop a deeper and more sophisticated  appreciation of style in our students.  Style -   or craft as the Fellini quotation below terms it - is of central importance to the course and students' success largely rests on their ability to analyse and evaluate authorial choices.  

As the Fellini quotation above points out, how something is written (or painted, or composed, or filmed) is of central importance and can be seen as the uniting force in a text. Indeed thinking of it in terms of craft (something authors work on and develop) rather than style (which suggests something effortless) can help develop students' appreciation: getting students to try out the craft and to experience writing from the writer's perspective helps them realize how difficult it is to do it well. 

A sensitive appreciation of a writer's craft and how they have chosen to express themselves should lead students to a deeper and more nuanced understanding and interpretation of a text's ideas.  In short, unpicking how a writer has written a text, should lead to an engaged and convincing reading of why that writer has written the text. In examination terms, if a student does well on criterion B then they will most likely also do well on criterion A.  It does not always work the other way around.  

On the page linked below are some ideas and activities to get students thinking about style in each of the four main literary forms.  Some might work early in the course as students encounter a literary form for the first time; others may help support the teaching of unseen extracts for Paper 1, or of whole texts being used anywhere on the course.  Further links to lesson ideas for more specific stylistic aspects can also be found in each section.