Why is Chinese Compo Making Our Kids Freaking Out

“一个风和日丽的下午，小明……” this is what a typical introduction of a Chinese composition written by a primary kid would look like. Any Chinese teacher in Singapore would agree that this is the most common introduction seen in Compositions, and “小明” has indeed survived over many decades, even generations. But wait, is there only one way to start a compo? Definitely not.

Why is Chinese Composition Making our Kids Freaking Out?
With at least 8 to 10 Chinese Composition to fulfill each year, and syllabus to rush, many a times, teachers usually briefly describe the pictures, explain the requirements, either asking students to complete within the curriculum time, if not bringing home to complete the work, leaving students clueless what to write, or scratching their head.

Many students have difficulties in writing a composition, shivers run down their spines when we talk about writing composition. Even teachers would have a hard time marking, being bombarded by many “Xiao Mings” and almost every piece of writing is about the same, which possibly explain why students often receive their scripts from their teachers only after weeks.

Composition writing should begin with drafting a planner, which many students think that it is redundant as the planner is not being graded. However, as the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”, one should spend at least 5 to 10 minutes to do the planning, deciding the characters in the story, either first person pronoun or third person pronoun, the theme of the story, development of the story twist, solution etc.

Introduction:
There are various ways to start a composition, weather, time, dialogue, sound, flashback, environment, characters, songs, describing a scenary etc.

Describing a person:
Our characters in the composition should not be a “stickman”, we should create all our characters with flesh and blood, by applying various techniques to describe, such as using speech, feelings, thoughts etc.

Cohesiveness:
A common problem that we often see in students’ composition, especially picture composition, is that all 6 pictures are not gel together properly. Every paragraph seems like a short story. The problem lies in the lack of Transitional devices in the paragraph. Transitional devices are words or phrases that help carry a thought from one paragraph to another.

Twist
In order for a composition to stand out, the twist is important. Good twist helps to propel the story to climax, adding in the element of surprise, avoiding predictability is the key to entice readers to read your story to the end.

3 Things to avoid in writing composition
1. “Ring……”the alarm clock rang, I realised it was just a dream.
2. Super-natural or scenes that we read in Fantasy stories
3. Ghost stories (though most people enjoy reading it)

A meal is not complete without dessert. A composition’s conclusion is equally important. This is the point where teachers grade our writing. Again, we can apply different writing techniques, rhetorical devices and strategies to impress our examiners.

Writing need not be a chore, if you want your child to enjoy writing, let the creativity juice flowing, think out of the box, excel in writing, or to overthrow “Xiao Mings” as the lead character, join our Chinese Mastership by Punggol Chinese Tuition.

These are some of the FUNtastic work of our students.