English Tip: Composition Planning

Planning is a crucial part of composition writing. Many students skip planning because of unfamiliarity with its structure or just plain laziness. Like any skill, it takes constant and consistent practice of its form to use it competently when it counts. Composition writing in itself is quite a large topic and this article only addresses the planning strategy, and not content and language.

For the purpose of providing some context to this strategy, we will use the sample composition task shown below:

The Structure

There are a few variations floating out there with different names for each component, but they’re all essentially the same thing.

The template structure that I teach my students is as follows:

• Introduction (IN)

• Rising Action (RA)

• Climax (CX)

• Falling Action (FA)

• Conclusion (CN)

While more adept writers can play around with this structure, for example in a flashback, I suggest that most Primary level writers stick to the structure. As a side note, flashback is grossly overrated and misused most of the time. However, that’s a discussion for another article.

Sample completed planning

The table below shows a sample planning based on the picture above. The numbers indicate the order in which each component is planned.

1. The Climax

The climax is the most important part of a story and should be the starting point of the planning. It is the crux of the conflict where the main character(s) have a revelation that changes the way they think or behave. The climax has 3 main characteristics:

• It is the most exciting part of the story

• All the events before this (RA) build up to this moment

• Things are not the same after this moment (FA)

For our sample task above, the climax is when our main character John chases his dog across the road and causes an accident.

2. The Rising Action

This part of the story covers the events that lead up to the climax. For our story, we have to explain how the dog ended up running on the road and causing the accident (CX).

3. Introduction

The introduction provides a setting for when and where the main characters have their rising action.

Many students write long flowery introductions to hit the word count or try to get some language points, but it’s really a waste of time and words. The language score is given based on the entirety of the composition, not awarded for every instance of ‘good vocabulary’. Thus, memorising impressive descriptions for the introduction will not contribute to the language score if the rest of the composition is not consistent in the quality of writing.

Keep the introduction lean:

• Only describe the weather if it affects the events in the story.

• Start the story where the rising action takes place.

• Only introduce characters that have a part in the rising action, climax or falling action

4. The Falling Action

What happens after the events in the climax have died down?

John can’t just go home after almost having an accident, as if nothing had happened. The paramedics have to check if anyone is seriously injured and need to be taken to the hospital. The police need to investigate the cause of the accident. There are other people involved in the accident. There are on-lookers in the immediate area.

5. Conclusion

I think the one conclusion that teachers are sick of reading is the ‘I learnt that…’ ending. In my own classes, I’ve made it my personal mission to purge stories that always end in some cliché moralistic lesson in the next generation of writers. Sometimes, there’s just no lesson to learn.

Instead, I suggest having the main character(s) reflect on the events that happened. Is there any change in the way the character views his or her world as the result of the climax? How does the character feel about all that had happened?

Planning should only take about 10 minutes. Having a clear plan will not only make the writing process smoother, but free the writer from worrying about the sequence of events, so that mental energy can be better spent on fleshing out details and adding in more rich descriptions.

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