Daily Reading: Monday 20th May 2019

So, welcome to the first of my daily "drip-feed" reading and writing posts. The plan is to post one extract of text per day for teenagers to read to widen their reading (and help to build up the skills required in the English GCSE if this is your plan!).

This week, I will be focusing on broadsheet opinion articles. I find that many students find this one of the most difficult genres of writing to emulate (and yet, for those who are interested, it makes up a whopping 25% of the GCSE English Language mark!) Therefore, it is not a bad idea to get familiar with them sooner rather than later if GCSE is your aim.

More importantly, however, I find opinion articles quite fun to read (but that might just be me!) They are often full of wit and scathing sarcasm, which can be quite entertaining.

It seems apt that the first article we are going to look at is about the importance of reading. Also, having recently met Bryony Gordon at her talk about her recent publication, “You got this!” my daughter might actually be inclined to read it. A good start all round.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/children-dont-need-world-book-day-us-screen-addled-adults/

NOTE: Please find a link to the full article above. I am unable to repost the whole article due to copyright restrictions. Below are extracts from the above article.

Children don't need a World Book Day - us screen-addled adults do

·         BRYONY GORDON

9 MARCH 2019 • 6:00AM

Anyone with a social media account will know that, this week, it was World Book Day. All over the internet, parents posted up pictures of their children dressed as characters from their favourite stories: the Cat in the Hat; Willy Wonka; Harry Potter; Pippi Longstocking, and so on and so on. How charming it was to be able to spend World Book Day not actually reading any books, but instead scrolling through pictures of children dressed up as their favourite books!

But this is not a piece criticising World Book Day, which I think is a wonderful initiative, doing a lot of good for children who don’t have ready access to shelves of books (the charity, organised up by the UN, aims to give every child and young person a book of their own). I’m also very fond of it because it is the only day of the year when my daughter is dressed and ready for school by 6.45am. 

What I will say is that we are in danger of losing sight of the point of it – in one major supermarket last weekend, I could spend 15 quid on a BFG costume, but I couldn’t buy a copy of the BFG. Might some parents be spending more on fancy dress costumes for World Book Day than on actual books, least of all ones for themselves? Given that statistics released this week showed that 49 per cent of British adults hadn’t read a book in the last year, that is entirely possible.

Encouraging children to read is a wonderful thing, and the best way to do it, 365 days of the year, is to spend time reading yourself. All the research shows that kids who are read to by their parents, and who see their parents reading, are more likely to end up reading lots themselves.

Increasingly, though, this is not happening, and you don’t need to have won a major literary prize to work out why. 

Grown-ups are far more likely to sit down with a screen nowadays than a good book. And while many of us worry endlessly about the effects of social media on our children, all that worry is good for nothing if we can’t keep off Facebook ourselves.

According to Ofcom, many parents now see watching TV with their children as a way of spending quality time together. This week, Dame Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of ITV, told a conference that being “well-watched” is as important as being well-read.

Perhaps the people who really need a World Book Day are parents, who instead of dressing up as their favourite characters, could pay £1 to their children for the privilege of being able to sit quietly and read their favourite book for half an hour, while the kids do the same? Otherwise, in 20 years time, children will be going to school celebrating World Boxset Day, which would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Not, of course, that any of them will have a clue who he is.

Discussion points

Those who have been educated in school will probably be familiar with the mnemonic AFOREST: a checklist for remembering rhetorical and persuasive techniques (there are other variations of this).

It stands for:

Anecdote/Alliteration

Facts

Opinions

Rhetorical questions/repetition

Exaggeration/Emotive Language

Statistics

Triplets (or rule of 3!)

See if you can identify any of these in the text.

Most opinion articles will be littered with these techniques. The more you can practise finding them in an article, the easier it will become to develop this style of writing yourself.

How does this link to GCSE English Language?

An AQA-style exam question on such an article would look something like this:

How does the writer use language to express her opinion that adults ought to read more?

A sample answer might look something like this:

Bryony Gordon uses the paradoxical statement, “in one major supermarket last weekend, I could spend 15 quid on a BFG costume, but I couldn’t buy a copy of the BFG.” This suggests that Gordon thinks that as a society, we are missing the point of World Book Day and that the costumes have become more important than the books themselves. She uses the rhetorical question, “Might some parents be spending more on fancy dress costumes for World Book Day than on actual books…?” to reinforce this message.

In her article, Gordon expresses her sadness that adults nowadays no longer seem to read as much as they did previously. She uses the shocking statistic,“49 per cent of British adults hadn’t read a book in the last year.” By demonstrating that nearly half of adults do not read books, she is suggesting that it is no surprise that children are not reading either.

Gordon ends the article with the pun, “in 20 years time, children will be going to school celebrating World Boxset Day, which would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Not, of course, that any of them will have a clue who he is.” Gordon plays on the word “tragedy” to demonstrate the irony that people may no longer know what a Shakespearean tragedy is if reading continues to decline at this pace.

Disclaimer: This is NOT (I repeat NOT) a model answer. In reality, you would need to write much more and use much deeper inference. This is simply a demonstration of the kind of language techniques you could be looking out for and the kinds of things you could begin thinking about. There are many, many other points that you could have made which would be equally valid.  

If you are interested in further information about this particular question of the AQA specification (which is paper 2, question 3), I would highly recommend the following sources (these will also explain the technical terms used above in more detail):

Mr Bruff's guide to answering paper 2, question 3
Mr Bruff's Guide to GCSE English Language
GCSE AQA English Language: The Revision Guide