Improving your writing with Charles Dickens

Parents and students often ask me how to improve writing skills.

Writing is examined at GCSE: descriptive writing, narrative writing and transactional writing.  But how to write better is not always taught well.

As an experienced English teacher and tutor, I know that students need good models. 

Previously, I have written about the inspiring effect of just reading the first chapter of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - the power of a dramatic beginning here, the importance of characterisation here, and making descriptive writing more effective here.

This post is about the brilliant way Dickens writes in another novel, Hard Times.

Here is a passage I use with students:

"Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next."

The next post will start to explore some of the easy-to-learn techniques that Dickens uses here. 

Students can start using them immediately to improve their writing.

Find out more about the tutoring I offer here.

Find out more about the free introductory session here.

Find out more about my ebooks to encourage better writing here.