Frog and Toad: Showing Vs. Telling

English teachers are famous for advising, "Show; don't tell!" But what does that mean?

I'll show you with examples from Harry Noden's Image Grammar (29).

Telling: Maxine is nervous.

Showing: Maxine glances at the midnight moon shadows from one side of the dark alleyway to the other, biting her nails as rivulets of perspiration soak her eyebrows.

Telling: She loved her daughter.

Showing: She kissed three-year-old Carrie softly on the cheek and tucked in the covers as Carrie slept.

Notice the word choices--glances, alleyway, biting, rivulets of perspiration, soak, kissed, tucked. Notice the pictures of nervousness and love painted without a single mention of either word.

Look at your students' writing. What do they tend to do--tell or show?  If they lean to the telling side, chances are their writing is general, bland, ho-hum. They're content to write, "It was ________!" (Fill in the blank with fun, cool, awesome, boring, or just about any other adjective.) Encourage them to include details and strong verbs, giving the reader a concrete picture. Done well, the reader will be able to infer whatever it is the writer is trying to show.

Recently, Frog and Toad helped us punctuate dialogue and experiment with synonyms. Now, for one last lesson, they're lending us some telling sentences to transform.

From Frog and Toad Are Friends:

One day in summer Frog was not feeling well.

Toad thought and thought.

Toad was getting colder and colder.

Frog and Toad sat out on the porch, feeling sad together.

They sat there, feeling happy together.

Ask students to write new sentences that do not directly mention the underlined words. For instance, how can they describe a day in summer without saying the word day or summer? How can they portray not feeling well without writing those words? To test their success, they can read their sentence(s) to someone. Can the person guess the gist of the original sentence(s)?

That accomplished, have students add pizzazz to an old writing piece with good old-fashioned showing.  It'll make English teachers around the world smile, leap, and dance. In other words, they'll be happy!

As always, share your students' best examples in the comments.

• For more practice, feel free to use the sheet here.
• For another showing vs. telling lesson, see this one based on Roald Dahl's Mr. Twit.

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Mr. Twit's Beard

 

Note: This assignment is adapted from Writing Fix and written directly to the student.

Read an excellent example of showing vs. telling in Roald Dahl's The Twits.  It's called "Dirty Beards."  (Warning:  I expect you will squint your eyes, wrinkle your nose, stick out your tongue, and say, "Yuck" as you read this.  I can picture this beautiful face in my mind!)

It begins like this:

"As you know, an ordinary unhairy face like yours or mine simply gets a bit smudgy if it is not washed often enough, and there's nothing so awful about that.

But a hairy face is a very different matter.  Things cling to hairs, especially food.  Things like gravy go right in among the hairs and stay there.  You and I can wipe our smooth faces with a washcloth and we quickly look more or less all right again, but the hairy man cannot do that.

And ends like this:

What I am trying to tell you is that Mr. Twit was a foul and smelly old man."

Now, Mr. Dahl could have just written "Mr. Twit was a foul and smelly old man" and gone on with his story, but he created a very vivid picture in our minds of exactly what he meant by foul and smelly.  Which one do you think is better?

I would like you to do something similar.  Think of a basic sentence, using a similar pattern. Maybe you want to include two or three adjectives like he did.  Then see if you can create a vivid picture for your audience by showing us what those words really mean.  You can follow Dahl's pattern here, too, tacking your original sentence on the end.

Actually, there is one more sentence to the chapter, which I didn't include.  It says:

He was also an extremely horrid old man as you will find out in a moment.

I wonder what he means.  I really don't know, since I haven't read the rest of the book.  Maybe you can write your own description before reading Dahl's.

If your students complete this assignment, please leave a sample in the comments.

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