Descriptive Writing - Using Vocabulary for Effect and Tone - Lessons 5 and 6

These lessons focus on having students create a specific effect, tone, or dominant impression of a place in their writing by looking at careful use of vocabulary, synonyms and then antonyms. They go through a series of short writing tasks where they practice using vocabulary to create different impressions on the reader and then apply this to an extended writing task where they write two opposing descriptions of the same place. This lesson begins to review and build on the skills in the other lessons in this unit (Lessons 1 to 4) but can be used independently of this as well.

Instructions are in the notes section under the slides.

This resource was originally created for a middle ability year 10 class but is suitable for years 9-11 and I have successfully used it with a range of abilities with some changes to timing and tweaks in differentiation.

I always find this lesson really brings on students’ descriptive writing if they’ve been struggling with creating a specific effect and teaching this use of vocabulary can then be further applied to narrative writing and creating shifts in tone to indicate conflict.

This usually takes me two lessons but can be turned into 3 if you want to look in more detail at the written model provided.