Interesting campaign: National curriculum is damaging children's creative writing, say authors:
“We risk producing a generation of children who believe that a sentence such as ‘I bounded excitedly from my cramped wooden seat and flung my arm gracefully up like a bird soaring into the sky’ is always better than ‘I stood and put my hand up’.”
I'd hazard you also run the risk of putting kids who aren't literary-minded off attempting to write anything ever again. All good storytelling is about communication. If you're not communicating your story clearly, it holds no power - be it written or spoken.
The idea of banning any word from a classroom is, frankly, fucking (I bet that one's definitely banned) ridiculous.
Hemingway would be turning in his grave, if we hadn't already ditched American literature from the syllabus.
The greatest boosts to vocabulary, as Busby pointed out, are reading and talking. When you're engaged in a story or a conversation, and you don't know a word, you go and look it up, or you ask someone. And you remember that word, because it was a piece in a tale you had already invested your attention in.
Forsooth, any nincom-ninny can conjure forth from their O-shaped goblets of toothy, tongue-tied enamel a sentence to confound the listener and confuse the grey-matter of the cranium. Yet 'tis no art to such tomfoolery. I grow wearisome of writing, and you, no doubt, splitting sentences hither and tither, should rather screw closed your pinkish eyelids than further subject yourself to such intemperate scribings.
Odious, superfluous and discombobulating - there's three words longer than 'crap,' yet far less efficient.
I bet these dolts also extol the virtue of the semi-colon for aesthetic diversity, and build suspense with...
*shudder*
What hope is there for tomorrow's youth?
I'm instinctively suspicious of a creative syllabus endorsed by any institution whose sole interest lies in cultivating a generation who will vote for them.
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