Monday, April 15, 2013

A Midsummer Night’s Dream - ENG1D

Assignments Thus Far:

Choose FIVE characters to describe in brief - (thumbnail sketches)
Social Media Profile for ONE character
OSSLT Skill - Write a news article about ONE of the major events of the play.

News Article Format

A news article follows a VERY specific pattern.

This is often referred to as the INVERTED PYRAMID.

(however, it isn’t 3D, so it’s just a triangle)

This pattern is a way of organizing information to fit the typical news form

On the OSSLT, you are given TWO things - a HEADLINE and a PHOTO

The challenge of this assignment - HOW DO I FILL ALL THOSE BLANKS?

Basically, we need to know how to implement the information from the HEADLINE and the PHOTO into an article that we make up ourselves.

The Inverted Pyramid

First few paragraphs answer WHO, WHEN, WHERE and WHAT IS HAPPENING - this is called THE LEDE

The BODY of the piece is made up of all the paragraphs that come after that (and there could be many)

This is the hard part

This is where we include DETAILS - what are the details? What would you actually write in here?

Learning these pieces of the BODY gives you something to structure your article.

QUOTATIONS from the characters that you invented who are in the story (from the photo and/or the headlines) - EYEWITNESSES or PARTICIPANTS - you actually need to give them names to get marks
EXPERT INPUT from people commenting on the event/story/whatever - ie a psychologist or teacher from the “guest speaker” article - another perspective is given and this can flesh out your article and give it a more important feel
HOW and WHY - you explain the event and maybe something about the reasoning
BACKGROUND - how did it get this way? What happened before?
Where is this going? CONSEQUENCES or RESULTS or RAMIFICATIONS
In general, you can also fill in the Who, What happened, When and Where with more specific details in the body

The LAST PARAGRAPH is the conclusion or summary and in this last piece we need to somehow find a CAPPER that spins us out into another thought or gives us a little idea to take away.

The trick is, what the heck does this mean? It often means introducing some added element of the entire subject

eg in the guest speaker story, you might end by saying, students in GDCI will be having many more interesting assemblies over the next weeks where they will blah blah blah

WHAT MAKES A NEWS ARTICLE GOOD OR NOT? (newsworthiness)

Something is newsworthy if it is interesting to a large number of people (might not include YOU)

Something is newsworthy if it is scandalous or scary or crazy or disturbing or unusual and doesn’t fit into the regular day to day

Something is newsworthy if it involves celebrity or politicians

Some topics are automatically newsworthy - WAR, SCIENCE, sports (reaally?), fashion, NATURAL DISASTER, ECONOMY, cars, CRIME, religion, etc (small caps are human interest stories)

A very dramatic and life or death, very emotional and impactful event is more likely to be in the news.

PLUS - A reading

You will need to choose a piece to read aloud.

I care not which piece you read aloud, so long as it has a MINIMUM of 10 lines.

NOW, Demetrius is chasing Hermia EXACTLY like Helena was chasing HIM!

He is a complete HYPOCRITE! (and a dirtbag!)

SO, now Lysander has been potion-struck and he loves Helena.

Helena is still in love with Demetrius.

Demetrius loves Hermia.

Hermia still loves Lysander.

There is no logic at work in the minds of these teenagers!

We are seeing something that is true, thanks to the crazy potion -

The FICKLENESS OF LOVE - (fickle means ever-changing)