Thirty seconds each, standing up
Round the room. Each person gives the scene of their story only — thirty seconds, past continuous, and one thing you could smell or hear. No events.
If you reach an event, you stop. This is harder than it sounds and it is the last drill of the unit.
Eight clauses. Match each to whether it belongs in the scene or is the event that breaks it.
The page is not the performance
On the page
Halfway through, my mother turned round in her seat and said, very quietly, “We are going to miss it.” She said it once. That was the worst part.
Out loud
And then — we are maybe two hours in at this point — my mother turns round. And she does not shout. She just says, we are going to miss it. That is all. And she does not say it again, and honestly that was worse than if she had shouted for an hour.
Three questions comparing the two versions.
1. The spoken version inserts we are maybe two hours in at this point. What is that for?
2. The spoken version says she does not shout before saying what she did. Why lead with the negative?
3. Which version should you perform today?
Turning 180 words back into four minutes
Three conversions
| On the page | Out loud | Why |
|---|---|---|
| For two hours he would not stop. | Two hours. And every twenty minutes my mother would say, shall we just ask? And he would not answer. | Speech expands what writing compresses |
| She said it once. | And she does not say it again. She never says it again. | Repetition is a spoken tool, not a written one |
| We still have the bag. | We still have the bag. It is in a drawer. My mother will not throw it out. | The ending gets more room out loud, not less |
Put the five moves of your spoken turn into order. It is the written shape with one change at the end.
The unit task, in three parts
Task card · Part one · Hand in · 4 minutes
Your clean rewrite of the memoir goes into your portfolio today.
A final check against five things, then hand it over.
- Five paragraphs, about 180 words, with the count written at the bottom.
- Everything in the past until paragraph five, which is in the present.
- One line of direct speech, in somebody’s exact words.
- One thing you could smell, hear or see, in paragraph two.
- No false friends from either round. Check exquisite, support, assist, realise, attend, eventually.
Task card · Part two · Speaking · 4 minutes each
A new partner who has not read your piece and will not. Your page stays face down on the table.
Four minutes, in the five moves, without looking at anything.
- Place it in time, then set the scene before anything happens.
- Stay in one tense system. If you choose the present, choose it in the first sentence.
- One line of direct speech, said the way they said it.
- Finish on now, and on the one thing you would do differently.
- If you lose your place, say anyway, where was I and keep going. Do not pick the page up.
Listener’s job. One page, three columns, and all three have to be filled:
1. React out loud at least eight times, and use at least three different reactions.
2. Every tense that broke, and roughly when — first minute, second, third, fourth.
3. The one sentence you would repeat to somebody else tomorrow.
Task card · Part three · The comparison · 6 minutes
You now have a marked written piece and a tally page from somebody who never saw it.
Find what four minutes of speech costs you, and put it in one sentence.
- Count the broken tenses in the writing. Count them on the tally. Which is higher?
- Look at when the spoken ones broke. Almost everybody clusters in the same place.
- Compare the sentence your listener wrote down with the one you thought was your best.
- Write one sentence: When I speak for four minutes, I lose ___ after about ___ minutes.
Closing the unit
Six errors, one from each part of this unit. Fix each and name which lesson it belongs to.
1. I walked home when I was seeing her on the other side.
2. So I am standing there and then my brother arrived.
3. I was not remembering her name at all.
4. We assisted the whole ceremony from the back.
5. She didn’t said anything for the rest of the evening.
6. And then it was finish.
One final paragraph, everything at once. One to four words per gap.
I thought she had the wrong person. I outside the library — the one on the corner, not the bookshop — and it hard. A woman across the road and said my mother’s name. I her at all. she had shared a flat with my mother in 1988 and had not seen her since. , that was the strangest ten minutes of that year.
What this unit was about
Four questions covering the whole unit.
1. I was reading when the lights went out. Which verb is the scene?
2. A story should end with —
3. Your friend says a house was exquisite. What have they said?
4. Telling a past story entirely in the present tense is —
The unit in one line. Two tenses and one join: the long thing takes the continuous, the short thing breaks it, and a story is what happens at that seam.
Everything else — the joints, the sense detail, the line of speech, the ending in the present — exists to make four minutes bearable for the person listening.
Next unit. You have told the past. Next you predict — what you think will happen, how sure you are, and how English marks the difference between a certainty and a guess.
Keep the sentence you wrote in part three. It closes Term 3, and the unit after next is the A2 assessment that everything so far has been building towards.