Getting to grips with GRIPPERS - a must to help support students with non-fiction writing

GRIPPERS is the acronym I feel best suits secondary age students. If they can get to grips with GRIPPERS, they can write to persuade, to inform, to explain!

This resource is a PowerPoint presentation which takes students through Guilt, Repetition, Imagery, Personal Pronouns, Provocative Language, Emotive Language, Rhetorical Questions and Power of 3 (as a plus).

I use a You Tube video of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech plus the transcript of the speech for students to listen to the rhetoric as well as identifying the techniques.

Each technique is explained and I show HOW to use each one. There are 3 written and timed tasks at the end of the presentation, where students are given seperate content, punctuation and appropriate register for audience criteria so that they can self assess and really put what they have learned to good use.