Witness statement

NARRATION. CLASS 1.

Plan:

1. Thinking about it: free-writing experience.

2. Working with a narrative text.

3. Understanding the uses of narration.

4. Understanding the structure of narration.

RULES OF FREEWRITING

1. Decide on a time limit of three to five minutes. Keep writing until your time is up. Keep your hand moving no matter what is happening. If you cannot think of anything to write, just write you name or another words until you can think of something.

2. Don’t worry about complete sentences or proper punctuation. Your thoughts may be disorganized. You may repeat yourself. You may write things you’d normally found stupid. That’s perfectly okay.

3. Occasionally, choose one key word or phrase from your freewriting and use it as a starting point for more writing.

Think about your childhood. Focus on a particular memory or incident that is very important for you. It may tell people about a change in your life or it may help people to understand you better. Freewrite about it for 5 minutes. Read what you’ve written. Have you come up with any interesting ideas? Is there anything you could use for an essay? Does this technique work for you?

Read the essay below to see how an acting experience affected the writer’s life. Then do the tasks below.

An Actor Is Born

I wish I could say that I was planning my debut on Broadway next season – or even that the experience was mildly successful. But I can’t. I don’t even know how I became involved in the first place. I’ve always known all the techniques for avoiding attention. I’m never late for class. I always sit in the back row. I keep my head down at the right times. But last year my family got involved, and life hasn’t been the same since.

The yearly drama production is always a big event around school. Last year, posters with strange objects that were supposed to be wind­mills, but looked more like clock hands run amock, went up everywhere. They decorated every available space – over the doors, on lock­ers, even hanging from ceiling fixtures. One of the newspaper reporters, a real go-getter, even managed to get a write-up in the local paper: “NORTHSIDE PLAYERS PRESENT A DRAMA­TIZATION OF SCENES FROM DON QUIXOTE. This fall, the Northside High School drama group has scheduled a production of scenes from Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quixote....”

Not long after the article appeared, my par­ents began one of those dinner table conversa­tions about “Susan’s Shyness and What Can Be Done About It.”

“Why don’t you sign up?” my father urged. “There are lots of things you can do offstage – lights, costumes, prompting. And it’ll be good for you. You’ll meet people and get out of your­self a little.”

Silence from me.

For some reason, this particular play really caught on at school. Maybe it was just the nuttiness – the strange, wonderful man who thought he was a knight and went off fighting windmills and showed people what it was like to have a dream. We had seen pictures of him in our world lit books, dressed up in his great-grandfather’s old, rusty armor. Anyway, my one true friend signed up and, in a moment of misguided fervor, so did I.

After that, it was all a chain of circum­stances. Halfway through rehearsal, the actress playing Camilla got sick. I was learning to work the lights, enjoying my place in the half-darkness of the back of the theater, when Mr. Guedez called my name. I don’t know why he ever chose me as an understudy in the first place – probably because it was a minor role and he had to have somebody, after all. It cer­tainly wasn’t my stage presence. Anyway, no one thought for a moment that Elizabeth wouldn’t be there. I don’t think she’d missed a day of school since kindergarten – until open­ing night, that is. That’s when she came down with the flu.

Everything happened awfully fast that night. I was rushed into Elizabeth’s costume and pushed out onstage. It took a moment for me to adjust to the bright lights (the ones I was supposed to work). Then I saw John dressed up in that crazy armor and staring at me with a strained look on his face. “Oh,” I thought con­fusedly. “I’m supposed to say something.” But nothing came out. There, in the glare of the spotlight, I stood onstage, absolutely alone and absolutely speechless. Later, they told me that I seemed to be say­ing my lines but that nobody could hear them. It didn’t get easier as the longest play in history went on. I remember stumbling onto the stage each time in a kind of merciful daze. I discov­ered if I didn’t look at the audience, I could retrieve most of my lines from my dim mem­ory. No one mentioned afterward that Camilla seemed fixated on the empty space above the stage.

I didn’t suddenly blossom into Katharine Hepburn, but the world didn’t come to an end, either. You still won’t find me leaping up to answer questions in class. But it was fun to go to the party with the rest of the cast, to laugh at some of the funny bloopers, and to feel good because everyone liked the play so much. For once in my life, I’d been in the limelight a little. And it didn’t feel so bad, after all.

Tasks for “An Actor Is Born”

1. Find the English equivalents of the following words and word-combinations:

буйствовать, быть вне себя___________

выйти из себя _____________

безумие ____________

дублер ____________

привыкнуть к чему-л____________

напряженный _____________

яркий свет ____________

спотыкаться _____________

милосердный _____________

посметь ______________

извлекать _______________

смутный _____________

рваться ______________

досадная ошибка ______________

в центре внимания______________

2. Explain:

- Who is Don Quixote ______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

- Who is Katharine Hepburn_________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

3. Find words related to theatre and explain their meanings.

4. Identify colloquial equivalents of the following neutral expressions:

- to try not to be noticed;

- to put up a poster;

- an ambitious enterprising person;

- to write an article;

- World Literature Class;

- madness;

5. Identify words and forms that have a strong colloquial colouring:

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

6. Put these sentences in order. Then look at the second paragraph of the text to see if they are in the same order.

__One of the newspaper reporters, a real go-getter, even managed to get a write-up in the local paper: “NORTHSIDE PLAYERS PRESENT A DRAMA­TIZATION OF SCENES FROM DON QUIXOTE.

__This fall, the Northside High School drama group has scheduled a production of scenes from Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quixote....”

__They decorated every available space – over the doors, on lock­ers, even hanging from ceiling fixtures.

__The yearly drama production is always a big event around school.

__Last year, posters with strange objects that were supposed to be wind­mills, but looked more like clock hands run amock, went up everywhere.

7. What effect do you think the acting experience had on Susan?

8. Write a brief summary of the story. Write one paragraph that contains 5 sentences.

9. Write one sentence which you could use to describe the most important idea of the story to someone who hadn’t read it.

10. Why is the story called “An Actor is Born”?

Can you think of another possible title for this story?

Write it in the space provided

rhetorical mode	definition	goal	based on	genres	my experience	characteristics
Narration
Description
Exposition
Argumentation

A long time ago there was a barn with owners named Mr and Mrs

Smith. They were poor and they only had a horse for riding, 2 sheep

for wool,1 pig and a bull and a cow for milk.

They were poor because their pig ate them out of house and home and

he didn’t share with the other animals. His name was Bob. ‘You should

go on a diet’ said Clarabelle the horse. ‘Oh be quiet, I’m not fat I’ve got

big bones’. A few minutes later Bob was rolling around on the ground.

‘I’m sick, I’m sick’, he shouted. ‘Help me, help me’. Mr and Mrs Smith

ran down and called the vet. The vet came quickly and said quietly, ‘If

he eats like he has been eating he’ll surely die’. ‘Oh’, groaned the pig.

Clarabelle overheard and said to the other animals, ‘Our friend is

dying, we’ve got to help him’. ‘Yeh’ said the other animals ‘lets go’.

They went up to Bob and said, ‘We are going to get you in shape’. First

they told him to eat only half of the food in the trof. Then they made

him run up and down the hill and made him swim in the duck pond.

He did this every day for three long weeks and he got better and he

thanked Clarabelle and Bob was never greedy again.

Erin, Year 4

Theme Don’t take more than you need

Orientation

Character Description

Pig – greedy

Horse – generous

Mr and Mrs Smith – poor farmers

Where Barn yard

When In the past

Complication

Events •Pig ate too much

• Pig wouldn’t share with other animals

• Pig gets sick

• The farmers call the vet

• The vet warns him he could die

Reflection •

•

Resolution

The horse and the other animals help him.

He gets better and stops being greedy.

Theme

Orientation

Character Description

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Where:

When:

Complication

Events:

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Reflection:

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Resolution

Richard Feynman was a famous physicist. He was bom on May 11, 1918, and he died of cancer on February 15, 1988. In addition to being a physicist, Dr. Feynman was a talented artist and had an interest in other fields, such as history and anthropology. In this passage, Dr. Feynman describes some of his memories of his father.

The Making of a Scientist

Before I was born, my father told my mother, “If it's a boy, he's going to be- a scientist."

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy he* used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, "This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across."

My father would stop reading and say, “Now, let's see what that means. That would mean that if he* stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here." (We were on the second floor.)"But his head would be too wide to fit in the window." Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.

It was very exciting and very, very interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude—and that they all died out, and that nobody knew why. I wasn't frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this. But I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains, a place where people from New York City would go in the summer. The fathers would all return to New York I work during the week, and come back only for the weekend. On weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods and he'd tell me about interesting things that were going on in the woods. When the other mothers saw this, they thought it was wonderful and that the other fathers should take iheir sons for walks. They tried to work on them but they didn't get anywhere at first. They wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn't want to because he had a special relationship with me. So it ended up that the other lathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend...

He was happy with me, I believe. Once, though, when I came back from MIT (I'd been there a few years), he said to me, "Now that you've become educated about these things, there's one question I've always had that I've never understood very well."

I asked him what it was.

He said, "I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon."

“That's right," I said.

He says, “Is the photon in the atom ahead of time?"

“No, there's no photon beforehand."

"Well," he says, “where does it come from, then? How does it come out?"

I tried to explain it to him—that photon numbers aren't conserved; they're just created by the motion of the electron—but I couldn't explain it very well. I said, "It's like the sound that I'm making now: it wasn't in me before."....

He was not satisfied with me in that respect. I was never able to explain any of the things that he didn't understand. So he was unsuccessful: he sent me to all these universities in order to find out those things, and he never did find out.

WITNESS STATEMENT

NEWS REPORT

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