Writing interesting little character sketches for your stories.

Writing interesting little character sketches for your stories.
Johnnie Young has drawn on his thirty five years of teaching English experience to help craft this resource.
When the students write stories and describe characters they often get locked into a certain type of description. For example:
“He was a big man, with a large brown coat and he was very strong and angry and his voice was loud and he had very thick hair which was long and he was scary and his hands were big and his eyes were very blue and…” and so on and so on.
One way to teach them to enhance interest in characterisation is to carry out a little written exercise where they focus attention onto the behaviour of the character in a little scene. This little scene becomes interesting in itself and acts as a microcosm of what the character is like. The behaviour of the character will show the essence.
This resource offers ideas for ten scenarios with a fully worked example and a transcript of actual words the teacher could say to the students to help teach them in reviewing critically the example illustration.
Offer them this list of written exercises for them to choose. One has been selected and worked through as an illustrative worked example.