Great stories carry the reader along effortlessly, like a current. Adept at capturing imagination and curiosity, and more importantly, keeping it, they hook the reader in and have you turning pages long after you told yourself you were going to bed. But how do they do this?
To understand, we must sometimes look at the story as a whole. And this is where some students struggle.
For a lot of lower secondary students, it’s easier to write about language, such as metaphors and individual words, than it is to write about story structure. Sometimes it’s quite hard to stand back and see what is going on in the story and crucially, how that affects how you might interpret character or situation.
In the video below, we look at a few texts and think about some ideas you can give your students to help them with writing about structure and effect.
Analysing story structure and effect
We’re not going to talk about every aspect of structure today, it’s a rather large topic, we’re going to focus on sequence: the order of events, what happens and the flow of the story. We’re going to look at something that is quite niche, but very exciting when you get into it – how the author presents information and crucially, at what point in the story is information revealed?
These are the questions that we ask ourselves in the video:
- At what point in the story is key information given to the reader?
- Who knows what and when? This doesn’t just mean the characters in the text, but also the reader.
- What information is shared with the reader and what is withheld?
- How does the reader’s knowledge affect how they react to characters and situations?
Identifying these things can be a fairly simple task, but the difficult part – and the bit that students tend to struggle with – is analysing the effect. For example, if a secret has been revealed to a character at the end of the text, what is the impact? Why did the author choose to reveal it at this point? And perhaps most importantly, what effect does this have on the reader?
When students can identify when, and crucially why, the author has presented (or withheld) information at a certain point in the narrative, it allows them to think more widely about the emotions evoked – in both the characters and the reader.
By bringing this type of thinking into their writing (by revealing the author’s secrets, in a way!), students are highlighting their critical analysis and understanding of narrative structures.
Graham Elsdon is a former English leader, teacher trainer and one of the authors of our lower secondary English series. For comprehensive writing support (including more author secrets!) check out our primary and lower secondary English resources.
