Writing Essays

Writing essays for school assignment has to follow certain scheme. If you deviate from the scheme you will not get any marks. When you are asked to write on a topic ' My Doll', you have to write on the features, how pretty it is, the colour of the hair, eyes.. along those lines. So when Sarah wrote that her doll talked and walked at night, she didn't get good marks for it. The same went when she wrote on a banana tree. She didn't get good marks since her banana tree had magical powers. And it didn't come as a surprise when she got a B for English in her UPSR exams.

A girl wrote on a life of a Papa water, Mama water and Baby water facing pollution in a river. The title of the essay was Water Pollution. It was for English paper in SPM exams. The teacher who marked the paper gave her an A. So did the Cambridge Exams Syndicate. She deviated from the scheme but the examiners had good sense to give her an A. Her English was very good.This is what creative writing is all about. And thank goodness that she was not penalised for it. These students must have read a lot and their minds work wonders for them. To me this differentiate a best student from the good ones where creative writing is concerned.

I can still recall a friend of mine wrote for an essay entitled 'My Future Husband'. I can't remember the exact words but something along this lines....

'My future husband must have the look of Robert Redford, the seriousness of Abraham Lincoln, the mind of Albert Einstein and the voice of Gilbert O'Sullivan'. How's that for a future husband?