Creating texts

Students create texts that enable them to apply the knowledge, skills, and understanding developed through their study of literary texts in a range of forms.

Students experiment with and adapt content, medium, form, style, point of view, and language to create their own texts. Students draw on their knowledge and experience of genre and literary devices to experiment with elements of style and voice to achieve specific effects in their own texts. In their texts they understand and apply literary conventions for different audiences and contexts, and may experiment with conventions and reinterpret ideas and perspectives. In creating their own texts, students show their understanding of ways in which the expectations and values of audiences shape a text by adapting form, personal style, language, and content to engage and position the audience.

The creating texts study focuses on:

• transforming texts
• creating a written, oral, or multimodal text.

Transforming texts

Students develop their understanding of genre by considering how texts may be transformed into other forms of the same text type or into text types different from the original. The aim of transforming texts is for students to explore the complex ways in which the form and conventions of a text are significant in the making of meaning, both for original and transformed texts.

Students learn ways in which a completely new text can be created by converting, or reimagining, a text to reflect a new social or cultural context.

Students evaluate some of the literary conventions of the original and transformed text types and the effectiveness of these in shaping audience response. To support their evaluation, students consider the ways in which meaning is altered when the text is transformed.

In exploring how to transform texts, students may, for example:

• transform an extract from an extended prose text into a monologue (e.g. an extract from Dickens presented from the point of view of a contemporary children’s rights campaigner)
• create a drama script based on a poem (e.g. a section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land presented as monologue)
• take a section of a film script and transform it into an extended narrative (e.g. select a scene, or collection of scenes, from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and write a descriptive narrative)
• use a minor character from one text as a major character in a new text with significant shifts to theme, plot, characterisation, or narrative voice (e.g. write a set of personal reflections from the point of view of Mr Wingfield from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie)
• create a poem from a newspaper article (e.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper about a social/political issue could be transformed into a poem or series of poems).

Creating a written, oral, or multimodal text

Students create a written, oral, or multimodal text that demonstrates understanding and mastery of the features of the chosen text type. They draw on what they have learnt from analysing texts in the other studies to demonstrate, in their own text, the textual conventions and stylistic features appropriate to the form of their choice. They identify the features of a range of forms of writing or speaking, on which to model their own text creation.

Students develop an awareness and control of language techniques and stylistic features appropriate to purpose, audience, and context.

Although the text that the student creates may extend or elaborate on ideas, themes, or issues encountered in the shared studies or the comparative text study, it should not be a response to a text or texts, or depend on close textual knowledge or analysis of a particular text.

The text may take one of a number of forms, for example:

• a written narrative
• a formal speech
• a newspaper or magazine article that describes a social, political, or sporting event
• expository writing
• a toast
• a performance
• a monologue
• a podcast
• a multimodal presentation incorporating a substantial amount of writing
• an imaginative hypertext
• a personal letter to explain and justify a point of view
• a description.