Hooks for the Writing Section

Be Brave

In the Writing section do something before presenting your thesis

For example

Put your reader in the picture

Imagine• you are stranded on a deserted island …

• one day you wake up to discover your whole life is a television program watched by millions …

• all your legal rights are suddenly taken away, you are removed forcibly from your family, and once a month you are forced to have sex with someone you have never met before …

• you are the last living person left on Earth …

Pose a Question• What would happen if you

ate nothing but fast food for 30 days?

• Why are Australian men so miserable?

• Is global warming as serious as we are led to believe?

• Why is the United States such a violent society?

• Where on Earth is Kazakhstan?

Paint a Picture or Set the Scene

• Bentrock, Montana, was a small town but it held a big secret…

• The old house was a ramshackle weatherboard, two storey building, with a dark central passage way and a library inhabited by ghosts …

Create a Puzzle or Mystery

The main highway used to pass directly in front of the ten timber cabins which made up the Bates Motel. Then the highway was moved, and hardly any travellers stopped at the motel any more. Which is probably lucky, considering what happened to Marion Crane.

Activity

Have a go at one or more of the following:

• Putting the reader in the picture

• Posing a question

• Painting a picture or setting the scene

• Creating a puzzle or mystery

They're mad, they're wild, they're out of control. Wayne and his scrawny girlfriend Scout are blazing across the United States, massacring innocent strangers. They're on a killing spree - like something we would expect to see in a violent, Hollywood movie. So as no surprise, Wayne and Scout are doing just that - they're ‘acting’ out their favourite movie, bringing a fictional world into reality. Ben Elton's novel Popcorn is centred around Wayne and Scout's ruthless mission of murder and destruction, their goal being to capture the film's director - Bruce Delametri.

Tell the Story of the Text in Dramatic Fashion

On April 20, 1999 two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris calmly walked into the cafeteria of their high school and cold-bloodedly shot twelve of their fellow students. ‘How could this happen?’ not just Americans but people all around the world asked. One man went in search of an answer.

Use a Quotation From the Text

• ‘Nolite te bastardes carborundum.’

• ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. ‘

• ‘Mother died today. Or perhaps it was yesterday. I don’t know.’

• ‘Greed … is good. Greed is right. Greed works.’

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

14

Use a Quotation From Elsewhere

• ‘Some of the worst films of all time have been made by people who think too much’ – Steven Soderbergh

• ‘A novel is a machine for generating interpretations’ – Umberto Eco

• ‘No two people read the same book’ – Edmund Wilson

• Documentaries have been described as ‘the creative interpretation of reality’.

• Feature films have been called ‘chewing gum for the mind’

15

Tell A Story or Relate an Experience

Your Own

• When I was a child …

• The other day …

• Two years ago …

16

Someone Else’s

A friend of mine …

My father …