TIP 3: Do Not Turn The Essay Into An “Action Packed” Movie ACTIONS are important in an essay as they serve to capture the details of what took place and serve to make the writing more realistic. Most students are able to include actions in their writing – however, they tend to have too many actions, resulting in what we call the “action-packed” movie effect. Consider the following writing: We were at Orchard Cineleisure. Several of my friends and I were on our way to the café. We were going to celebrate as our examinations were over. Suddenly, I bumped into a teenager. He stared at me and shouted. Then, he stepped closer. I told him that I was not. As you can see, such a writing style will hardly engage any readers. It is boring and it will be a miracle for any teacher or PSLE Marker to not fall asleep after reading the first few paragraphs. The problem is that Writing is quite single-dimensional, unlike movies where there are sounds , visuals and special effects to complem...
TIP 2: Memorising Essays Does Not Help For a start, model essays do help your child pick up the Organisation (or what we call the Paragraphing Structures ) that is required for the Narrative / Recount styles of writing. However, a BIG MISTAKE that many misguided parents often commit is to get their child memorise model essays of different themes for ideas. There are two problems with such an approach: Firstly, many of you may have noticed that the model essays in guidebooks often vary in terms of the writing quality. Guess what? – You are right! These essays are often written by different students with different writing standards. Now, let’s assume for a moment that these essays were all written by the same student and they are Band A essays. This still serves little to help students because the benchmark may be too high for them. What happens in such a scenario is that students may end up even more confused or even demoralised. The second problem is that whe...