HOT
• It was hot. It was like a million degrees. I was
sweaty. I felt terrible. I wanted to go swimming.
It was the hottest day of the year.
• What do you notice?
Sherman Alexie from The Absolutely
True Diary of a Part time Indian
• What do you notice?
• What gives the passage energy?
• What is the passage showing?
Jacqueline Kelly from The Evolution of
Calpurnia Tate
By 1899 we had leaned to tame the darkness but not the Texas
heat. We arose in the dark, hours before sunrise, when there
was barely a smudge of indigo along the eastern sky and the rest
of the horizon was still pure pitch. We lit our kerosene lamps
and carried them before us in the dark like our own tiny
wavering suns. There was a full day’s work to be done before
noon, when the deadly heat drove everyone back into our big
shuttered house and we lay down in the dim high-ceilinged
rooms like sweating victims. At three o’clock, when it was time
to get up again, the temperature was still killing.
*What do you notice?
*What is it showing?
*How is the passage different than the one by Alexie?
*Which has more energy?
Fitzgerald, From The Great Gatsby
• Pg. 114:The next day was broiling, almost the last,
certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train
emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot
whistles of the National Biscuit company broke the
simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car
hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to
me perspired delicately for a while into her white
shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under
her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a
desolate cry.
• What do you notice?
• How is this passage different from the others?
• How does this passage have energy?
Journal: Showing Vs. Telling
Giving your writing more energy!
• Now write your own showing piece in your journal.
• You have some options here, you can either:
▫ Look through your portfolio and choose a piece of writing that
you know you could have given more energy by showing more
instead of telling. Take a part of that writing and energize it with
some showing (use ideas from the examples we discussed)
▫ OR: look at the writing you brought for your WRG today, can
your writing use more energy by showing more? Re-write part of
your WRG for today by showing instead of telling.
▫ OR: write a showing paragraph for the phrase “She was mad”
▫ OR: Make up your own showing paragraph using any showing
prompt you would like to