9.23 Showing vs. Telling.pptx Intro to writing

Writing Techniques

1. Showing and Telling Illustrating Ideas vs. Explaining Ideas Sep 23 English Buffet Presented by Shu

2. Understand the difference between “showing” and “telling” in writing. Practice transforming “telling” sentences into “showing” sentences, and vice versa. Learning Objectives

3. In literature: Telling writing overtly talks about an idea, like what a character is feeling or thinking, directly. You might be most familiar with this writing style in the way that it shows up in academic writing: Topic sentences are forms of “telling”—they tell your reader directly what you’re going to cover in a certain paragraph or section of an essay. Telling: What is writing that tells ?

4. Showing , a lso referred to as scene , showing expands details and describes them across a large space on the page. This technique is essential for describing significant details and events, because showing allows the reader to experience the scene along with the narrator. Showing: What is writing that shows ?

5. Telling : Elroy drove the boat for fifteen minutes until we reached Canadian waters. He cut the engine and began fishing. Showing : For ten or fifteen minutes Elroy held a course upstream, the river choppy and silver-gray, then he turned straight north and put the engine on full throttle. I felt the bow lift beneath me. I remember the wind in my ears, the sound of the old outboard Evinrude. For a time I didn’t pay attention to anything, just feeling the cold spray against my face, but then it occured to me that at some point we must’ve passed into Canadian waters ... Elroy cut the engine, letting the boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. The old man didn’t look at me or speak. Bending down, he opened up his tackle box and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to himself, his eyes down. Example 1 Showing Tim O’Brien “On the Rainy River,”

6. C hoppy water the river choppy and silver-gray Silver-gray

7. put the engine on full throttle the sound of the old outboard Evinrude https://youtu.be/s0fhaZA0xyg

8. feeling the cold spray against my face

9. busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader

10. Telling : The student cheated during the exam. Showing : Under the watchful eyes of the invigilator, Jade subtly slid his sleeve up to reveal a string of equations scribbled in tiny handwriting on his forearm. Example 2 generated by chatGPT

11. Telling : The teenager was scared to speak up. Showing : Jenna twisted her sweater sleeve tighter around her fingers, her mouth opening slightly then closing again as she looked around the circle of laughing faces, her voice lost in the sudden lump in her throat. Example 3 generated by chatGPT

12. Try to apply the SHOWING TECHNIQUES and create a Telling vs Showing example Here are the possible topics: They enjoyed their basketball/badminton game. She/he didn’t want her friend to know she was rich. The student was secretly using his/her phone in class. He/she discovered he was good at painting. She/he felt incredible after winning the game … Group Activity – 5~10min

13. Also refered to as summary , this technique takes details (or revealing information) and describes it in a small space on the page. While showing is recommended for significant scenes and details, telling has an important place in narrative and academic writing because it is concise. Showing fills the space on the page with intimate details. If this is the only style the writer uses, the reader is likely to feel overwhelmed with details that may not seem significant. Telling between significant portions of showing helps transition the reader and give them a stronger sense of what the writer wants noticed, and what the reader can just accept as simple information. Why Telling?

14. Telling : Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders--a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed. Wolff uses telling to pull readers into the setting, give them a sense of character, and begin creating atmosphere: Example 4 Telling “Bullet to the Brain” by Tobias Wolf

15. On my birthday, my married boyfriend gave me a present. We were sitting next to each other in his car, driving down the road, when we saw his wife driving toward us. He pushed me down onto the floor so she wouldn’t see me. While down there, I noticed all sorts of things about the car, the way it smelled and looked… Prompt for me when I was in the college

16. What is telling vs showing? How did you write a “showing” story? What are the important scenes? Do you summarize or show them? Summary