Composing narratives

How can the story of climate change effectively be told?

Immediately, in many ways, by people everywhere.

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The climate change story

A new climate change overlay for Google Earth was launched in the UK today.

Here you can read an interactive map telling the story of future temperature levels around the world.

Another map shows before and after photos of Antarctica’s melting ice over the last few years.

2002jhicemelt1

What criteria can be used to assess a narrative?

Yesterday I trained as a Marker for the new national literacy assessment program. For the next 5 weeks I will be reading children’s scripts and marking them according to 10 criteria. Can these criteria be used to assess artwork and a thesis? How useful are they for someone composing a narrative?

From the National Marking Guide I read:

Audience – The writer’s capacity to orient, engage and affect the reader. Caters to the anticipated values and expectations and values of the reader; influences or affects the reader through precise and sustained choice of language and use of language and use of narrative devices; can subvert genres

Text structure – The organisation of narrative features including orientation, complication and resolution into an appropriate and effective text structure.

Ideas – The creation, selection and crafting of ideas for a narrative.

Character and setting – The portrayal and development of character. The development of a sense of place, time and atmosphere.

Vocabulary – The range and precision of language choices.

Cohesion – The control of multiple threads and relationships over the whole text, achieved through the use of referring words, substitutions, word associations and text connectives.

Paragraphing – The segmenting of text into paragraphs that assists the reader to negotiate the narrative.

Sentence structure – The production of gramatically correct, structurally sound and meaningful sentences.

Punctuation – The use of correct and appropriate punctuation to aid reading the text.

Spelling – The accuracy of spelling and the difficulty of the words used.

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Posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008