 Welcome to this webinar. I'm Deb Rocky, your hostess, and I'm a professional developer with ESU-8 in Neely, Nebraska. Today we're going to explore the writing notion of show don't tell. And show don't tell refers to any type of narrative writing or descriptive writing. And as you can see from my introductory slide here, we are going to focus on descriptive writing today and the show don't tell notion. Showing for some reason is a more difficult skill for the writer to express and get down on paper, because telling is one of the hardest habits to erase from your writing style. It's so easy to tell and just assume that your reader is going to read into that and know just all of the details that you're going to add, all of the, either the sensory details, the adverbs, adjectives, stronger verbs that you're going to use. But unless you actually focus on the idea of show don't tell, showing is so much more interesting than writing that tells us. Because, you know, it's really worth the extra work to do that. I'm going to share with you some tips and ideas on that. So there is some good news about show don't tell. It's really pretty easy to show if you learn just one trick and that one trick is the idea that you need to be more specific. Specificity will fill the gaps from your telling and bring to life your writing. It will create those pictures in the minds of your readers of what is actually happening within your writing. Let's begin with this descriptive writing prompt. And I want to help break this prompt down and give you a little bit of insight into this prompt as to how we make it our writing be a showing rather than a telling. The first thing that this prompt tells us is that we're supposed to think about a special place. And a special place, they give some suggestions, which are highlighted here about someplace around your home or school or someplace you may have gone, a field trip or a place you went with your family. Those special places that are listed here are specifically just other ideas that the writer might use in order to simulate their thinking. Their special place may not be any one of those listings and it's not incorrect if they don't actually use one of these suggestions to identify their special place which you're going to write about. Then what the prompt does here is it tells them what genre they're actually going to write in. Here it clearly identifies that they're going to describe it and then it asks them in the second paragraph to write a description. So this is real important information also to the writer. Now if we're going to describe what it tells us also in the second sentence of the prompt in the second paragraph is that you need to use your five senses to help describe the place for the reader. The five senses, as you know, and I have them underlined here, they identify them within the prompt is that seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, all of those kinds of things because this prompt specifically identifies what it looks like or what you might see, the sounds you might hear or any smells that would help describe this place to you. So now if you look at the writer looks at this, they know what they have to do. They have to write a descriptive piece about a special place and they know that how they have to do it. They have to use their five senses to help them describe that place for the reader. So it's real important teachers and writers that you actually unpack the writing prompt before you ever get started with it. And that's a real great skill to teach your students as well. Let's get into the writing prompt and let's see what's happening. I have for you right now a telling example and follow along while I read this telling example to you. They went on vacation to see the Black Hills. They all enjoyed it very much when they tried to go home, their car's engine light was on. They stayed another night and decided to spend their time at the hotel pool while their car was fixed. Now, what questions come to mind to you as I read this piece? There are some vague details that are found within this particular piece. For instance, I might point out who is they. We have no idea who they is, how many is they, and all that kind of stuff. We know that they enjoyed their vacation to the Black Hills. We don't know how long they stayed in the Black Hills. We do know that they had car trouble when they were ready to go home. But we don't know how they solved their car trouble problem. Part of the solution for the car trouble problem was that they stayed another night and they enjoyed their time at the hotel pool while the car was being fixed. When you look at this telling example, is this writing specific enough? The answer is no. Not at all. It's very vague. It's just a listing. It's a telling of what actually happened. There are no details, no specificity within this particular piece. Let's look at this showing example here and follow along while I read this one. The Jeans family drove to the Black Hills for a vacation. They got there and saw many sites. They took many pictures and enjoyed their time together. When they were ready to leave, the engine light on the car was lit up. Father James decided to take the car to a dealership to get it fixed. When the mechanic looked at the car, he found out what was wrong. He told Father they could fix the car, but they did not have the part the car needed. He then told Father they could get the part, but it would not be here until tomorrow. So the Jeans family was given a loaner car from the dealership and they found a hotel to stay for the night. Luckily, the hotel they found had a great pool with a great view of Mount Rushmore in the distance. The next day, the dealership fixed the car and the Jeans family drove home. Do you remember the questions that I asked when we looked at this telling example? I asked who is they and what did they do while they were in the Black Hills? If you look at this example, it tells us who they are. We know that they're the Jeans family right now. We still don't know what they saw and what they did, but we do know that they took pictures and they really enjoyed their time together as a family. What we do have more showing about though is about the engine light being on the car and how that was fixed. We know that a mechanic looked at the car specifically at the dealership. We knew that they could fix it, but we know the part wasn't there. But the good news was they could get the part to be there the next day. We also know that in order to be able to fix the car, the family was given a loaner car from the dealership. They stayed at a hotel. They had a great pool where they stayed and they could view Mount Rushmore in the distance. And we know that they motored back home. We do know that much. It provides you the reader with insights and details. Now obviously there's more that needs to be added to this story. This version has not yet included all the vaguely provided details of the telling example. But there's still more room for more specificity, isn't there? Do you want to know how their time was spent? Maybe when we consider those first three sentences, why the James family enjoyed their vacation and what did they do see and experience. Let me show you another example, a little stronger example of a showing example. And let's see what happens here. Follow along while I read this example. The James family, Sally and Tony and their two children, Ty and Rachel went on a five day family vacation to the Black Hills last summer. As they traveled down the highways of South Dakota, they made a list of the sites they most wanted to see. This included visiting the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, taking the Black Hill Cave tour, enjoying a chuck wagon dinner and show, plus maybe a little fishing if there was time. Their first stop in the Black Hills was the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. As the family parked and walked towards the memorial, Ty and Rachel could not believe what they were seeing. They marveled at the size of the faces carved in the mountainside. They were huge. Every detail of each person president's face was clear and prominent. They spent the entire afternoon exploring the memorial and its surrounding attractions. They took loads of pictures, pictures of the faces, pictures of the surrounding scenery as they hiked over its trails, pictures of the wildlife they encountered, and best of all, a family picture with the faces in the background. With the ellipse there, we could add about their issues with the engine light being on in their car from showing example previous to this. Do you see how much more specificity has been woven into the details? See how it's become longer in length already because we've taken just the three sentences right here in this first paragraph. Look how they've been expanded. We now have a paragraph for each sentence and the expansion as to what actually happened to the James family beyond their first stop at the Black Hills. Now any descriptive prompt lends itself to specificity. It's that use of adjectives and adverbs and of course adjective and adverb phrases which add the details of the writing which allows us to have that specificity. Without the details, your writing can turn just into a list with flat uninteresting facts. This example with even more specificity actually has more dimension than a piece of writing does. It gives us more of a view inside. Now as the next part of this quick lesson about show don't tell, I'm going to share with you a short powerful video entitled showing versus telling. Now this video speaks specifically about personal narrative. Remember in my introduction I talked about both narrative and descriptive writing need to show don't tell. So the message that this video gives to you or provides for you is offers about adding is very, more details is very, very, fits our purpose very perfectly. So we're going to move right into that video. The next step for your personal narrative is to add details to your events. Every detail that you add must appeal to one of the five senses. Here, see, smell, taste or feel. The biggest issue that we see with students in their writing is that they tell us what's happening instead of showing us what's going on in the story. Confused about what that means? Let's take a look at an example. Here's a sentence in a paper. The basketball game was fun. While there's nothing grammatically wrong with that sentence, all it does is tell us what's going on. And it's sort of boring. The reader is left to do all of the work or infer when it comes to imagining what's happening. When we read essays like this, we want to toss them out the window. Let's take that sentence and make it into a showing sentence. It'll be a lot more interesting that way. So how do we do that? First, let's think about what happens at a basketball game to make it so fun. Some ideas I can come up with are the crowd, the cheering, the food, the players and the action. That's a pretty good list so far. Now let's take our list and match it up to the senses that it appeals to. Some sounds that I can think of are the cheering of the crowd, the buzzer, the swish of the net, the yelling of the players, the coach, the chants of the cheerleaders and more. I can repeat the same process with the sense of sight. I could see the sweat on the basketball players, the shiny pom-poms of the cheerleaders, the ball whizzing through the air and the goofy dance moves of the mascot. I can repeat this process with each of the five senses, but I'm only going to show you two. Now we're going to work together using the other three senses to come up with some more details to add to our showing paragraph. The other three senses are taste, smell and touch. Now that you know a little more about showing versus telling, you are ready to try out this technique with your group. Good luck. Well, I want to thank you for your participation. My wish is that this short presentation has stimulated and empowered you to incorporate some of the ideas presented today. Thank you for being with me and I'll see you next time.