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Texts and Human Experiences: Module C – The Craft of Writing

Year 12 English

Finding Resources in Accessit

The Guardian

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming.

YouTube

Well known as an actor, presenter, author and comedian, Stephen Fry is also a poetry enthusiast, and has written a guide to writing poetry entitled The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. In the video Stephen will talk us through the technicalities of poetry, looking at rhythm, metre, form, rhyme, enjambment and caesura. We’ll also hear about how form can help poets to shape and express emotion, and why it is important to read poetry slowly, and to read it aloud.

In which John Green kicks off the Crash Course Literature mini series with a reasonable set of questions. Why do we read? What's the point of reading critically. John will argue that reading is about effectively communicating with other people. Unlike a direct communication though, the writer has to communicate with a stranger, through time and space, with only "dry dead words on a page.

TED Talk

"If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she's gonna call me Point B ... " began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis -- from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York's Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. -- and gives two breathtaking performances of "B" and "Hiroshima."

Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, looking for hints of how hers evolved.

Scholastic

In late 2015, Scholastic, in conjunction with YouGov, conducted a survey to explore family attitudes and behaviours in Australia around reading books for fun. The key findings of this research, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,748 parents and children, including 358 parents of children aged 0–5; 695 parents of children aged 6–17; plus one child aged 6–17 from the same household.

Lovecraft

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.