Word Sounds Elegy
This was a project I did as part of my Gold Arts Award. I worked with GCSE and 6th Form students at The Hewett School.
The project involved three workshops, and tied in with the creative writing group's collaborative novel which they were writing, called The Librarian's Revenge. The result of these workshops was an elegy which ended up forming part of the novel, plus some display materials to help promote the novel. The key focus was on the sounds of words, and making these more visible to the reader.
The first workshop involved writing the elegy. We looked at examples of elegies, decided on the sections, and wrote these using as much alliteration, assonance, sibillance, repetition etc., as possible - so that the writing was full of sounds as well as meaning.
The second workshop looked at playing with the concept of words as physical things - we wrote parts of the elegy onto big banner paper using sticks, some we wrote 'invisibly' using wax candles, and then revealed with paint, some we wrote upside down, some we cut out as words from magazines - showing you which letters and words you had to search for most.
In the third workshop we wrote the elegy onto a board. We used symbols, and different colours and writing styles and shapes as a code to highlight the literary, physical word-sound, techniques that were in the writing.
The project involved three workshops, and tied in with the creative writing group's collaborative novel which they were writing, called The Librarian's Revenge. The result of these workshops was an elegy which ended up forming part of the novel, plus some display materials to help promote the novel. The key focus was on the sounds of words, and making these more visible to the reader.
The first workshop involved writing the elegy. We looked at examples of elegies, decided on the sections, and wrote these using as much alliteration, assonance, sibillance, repetition etc., as possible - so that the writing was full of sounds as well as meaning.
The second workshop looked at playing with the concept of words as physical things - we wrote parts of the elegy onto big banner paper using sticks, some we wrote 'invisibly' using wax candles, and then revealed with paint, some we wrote upside down, some we cut out as words from magazines - showing you which letters and words you had to search for most.
In the third workshop we wrote the elegy onto a board. We used symbols, and different colours and writing styles and shapes as a code to highlight the literary, physical word-sound, techniques that were in the writing.
