高中英语记叙文写作技巧(精品20篇)

记叙文是以记人、叙事、写景、状物为主，以写人物的经历和事物发展变化为主要内容的一种文体形式。下面是小编整理的记叙文写作的十种技巧，欢迎阅读。

一、巧设悬念

把文章后面将要表现的内容，先在前面作一个提示，但不马上解答，以引起读者的好奇兴趣，产生急于看下去的迫切心情，这样文章的开头，我们称为巧设悬念。它的好处是能避免结构上的单调，使文章的情节波澜起伏，引人入胜。

二、一线串珠

记叙文的线索是贯穿全文、将材料串连起来的一条主线，它把文章的各个部分联结成一个统一、和谐的有机体。如果说丰富而生动的材料是一颗颗珍珠，那么线索就是将这些珍珠串连起来的一条线。

记叙文的线索主要有实物、人物、事件、时间、地点以及以作者的思想感情等。无论采取哪种线索，都必须从表现文章的中心思想和体现各种材料之间的内在联系出发，灵活巧妙地确定。

三、以小见大

以小见大，就是以小题材表现大主题的方法。生活中有些材料看起来似乎很平常，但却包含了深刻的意义。“一滴水也可以反映太阳的光辉”。只要善于透过现象发现本质，小材料同样能反映深刻的主题。如《一件珍贵的衬衫》。

四、穿插流动

五、粗笔勾勒

粗笔勾勒法就是用寥寥的几笔重点勾勒出人物外貌的主要特征。采用粗笔勾勒法描写人物肖像，可以对人物的身材、体型、衣着、容貌、神情、姿态、风度的某一方面或几个方面作简要的勾勒。

运用粗笔勾勒法描写人物肖像要抓住人物的最主要的特征，用朴实的文字简略地写出来，不宜用过多的形容词、过多的比喻。其次要简练传神，通过寥寥几笔勾勒出人物的大致形象。

六、曲径通幽

杨朔的散文《荔枝蜜》意在由蜜蜂而赞颂劳动人民的崇高品质，并表达自己向劳动人民学习的意愿。但文章并没有直接道出这一主题，而是通过展示作者对蜜蜂思想感情的变化，曲折有致地表达了主题。作者开头写自己对蜜蜂在感情上“疙疙瘩瘩”，接着写自己因吃了荔枝蜜而“想去看蜜蜂”，然后又写了蜜蜂的辛勤劳动与养蜂人的介绍。文章结尾写作者做梦“变成一只小蜜蜂”。由此可见，“曲径通幽”是指一种不是开门见山，直抒胸臆，而是曲折委婉地逐步显现主题的谋篇手法。

运用“曲径通幽”法，要注意两点：(一)“曲径”是手段，“通幽”是目的，手段要为目的服务。(二)行文的曲折应适当有度，不要为曲折而曲折。

七、烘托艺术

烘托艺术原是中国画的技法名称，是指渲染某一部分，衬托出另一主要部分来。把这种手法运用到文章的构思中来，就是从侧面通过描绘某件事、景或人的方法来衬托出主要人或事物，又称“衬托法”。衬托，也叫映衬。用类似的或反面的事物，使主要事物意思更加鲜明突出，从而达到强烈的表达效果。如“红花还须绿叶扶”。有了陪衬的事物，被陪衬的事物才会显得突出，才能得到更加充分的说明。

1、衬托，可分正衬和反衬。

正衬，就是用类似的事物，从正面去陪衬。烘托主要事物。如“风萧萧兮易水寒，壮士一去兮不复返。”用冷风寒水来衬托壮士此行的悲壮。又如“蓝天衬着矗立的巨大雪峰”，用蓝天衬雪峰，使雪峰更高大

反衬，就是利用同主要事物相反或相异的事物作陪衬。如上例中的蓝天的蓝，来衬托雪峰的白，使雪峰更洁白。又如“蝉噪林愈静，鸟鸣山更幽”，以有声衬无声。

2、运用衬托要爱憎分明，要宾主分明，陪衬事物与被陪衬事物，要让人一看便清楚，不能喧宾夺主。

3、衬托和对比的区别：

对比，是把两种不同的事物或同一事物的两个不同方面放在一起相互比较。它与反衬有些相似，但不同。对比，意在比，突出的对象是双方的，对立两事物无主宾之分。

衬托，意在衬，两事物有主宾之分，突出的是主要一方。如：“先天下之忧而忧，后天下之乐而乐”与“已是悬崖百丈冰，犹有花枝俏”，前句是对比，后句是反衬。

八、画龙点睛

画龙点睛是指在适当的时候以一二句议论，点明事物、人物、景物的意义之所在，或揭示作品主题，醒人之耳目，给人以启迪。点睛之处可以是在篇中，也可在篇末。

九、铺垫蓄势

铺垫也称铺叙衬垫，它是为了突出主要的人物或事物而铺叙另外的人物或事物以作衬垫。运用铺垫写法是为了蓄积气势，是为了突出文章主旨。陶铸《松树的风格》前几段的大量文字浓墨重彩地描绘松树的形象，赞美它“要求于人的甚少，给予人的甚多”，又用杨柳、桃李同松树作对比，补充说明松树“给人以启发、以深思和勇气”，直到第九段作者才笔锋一转，点明题旨说：“我每次看到松树，想到它那种崇高的风格的时候，就联想到共产主义风格。”原来此篇前面对松树的描绘和赞美是铺垫蓄势，后面对共产主义风格的赞美才是全文的主旨。这篇文章正因为有了前面形象感人的铺垫，后面入题也才显得格外坚实有力。杜牧的《阿房宫赋》第一段极力描绘阿房宫规模的宏伟和建筑的壮丽;第二段极力渲染阿房宫中美女之多和珍宝之富;第三段夹叙夹议，论述秦王朝统治者穷奢极欲，大营宫室，招致国家迅速覆亡、宫室一旦毁灭的必然结果;最后第四段作者以“呜呼”领起，发出深沉的议论慨叹，指出秦统治者要能爱天下之民，国家就不会败亡，表明秦之灭亡乃是一个深刻的教训。这篇赋，前两段的描绘渲染，是为后两段的议论铺垫蓄势，描绘渲染是议论的基础，议论则揭示主题，突出文旨，这正是铺垫蓄势的用意所在。

运用铺垫手法须注意两点：一是要注意写好铺叙的那一部分，只有将这部分写充分了，才能有效地蓄积气势。二是运用铺垫要自然，如果为铺垫而铺垫，过多地堆砌，反会暴露出人为的痕迹，那效果就适得其反了。

十、前后照应

前后照应法可以使文章严谨连贯，浑然一体，又突出内容和结构上的内在联系。照应一般有以下几种：

1、内容和标题相照应。这种照应方法常常是内容安排多处和题目照应，或在恰当的地方直接、间接地点明题意。如《背影》，文中多次描写“背影”，既与标题“背影”相照应，又进一步点明题旨，充分表达了作者对父亲深深的思念之情。

2、行文中间照应。这种照应方法就是在文章前面写事，后面行文交代前面所写事的结果，使内容相互补充，层层深入。

3、结尾与开头照应法。在文章的结尾处对开头交代的事情作必要的提及，使文章首尾一致，成为有机的整体。如《白杨礼赞》一文，开头和结尾照应，不但使文章结构显得非常完整，而且使作者的赞美之情得到了淋漓尽致的抒发。

导语：英语在小升初入学考试中的作用越来越大，小六的学生英语水平差距不大，如何才能在小升初英语考试中脱颖而出，小升初英语写作成为关键，下面是小编收集的如何写出高分英语作文方法，欢迎大家阅读!

书面表达是考查学生英语综合水平的一个重要途径，很多孩子英语口语好，却无法写好英语作文。而现实情况却是从初一甚至从小学开始就已经有了对书面表达的考查，所以练习英语写作也是我们学而思小升初课程的重要环节，帮孩子们打好基础。

1、语法：这是现在孩子们在英语写作中丢分最多的一项。

(1)写完作文后要记得检查：语法知识需要靠我们平时一步步积累，但是孩子们要注意在写完作文之后一定要细心检查自己的作文，一些学过的语法点不要再错了。

(2)避免使用自己拿不准的句子：很多孩子喜欢用长句、复合句等。可是又对这些句子掌握得不是很牢固，所以很容易出错。一切拿不准的词和句子，都应该使用自己会的简单句和简单词，这样才能给考官留下好印象。

2、格式：拿到作文题，一定要把握好题目的要求，看清是哪种类型的题目，确定好相应的格式。

常考的题如日记，日记的格式就是需要在第一行左方顶格写上日期和星期，右方写上天气，然后再开始写正文。需要提醒大家的是，日记基本上都是描写已经发生过的事情，所以孩子们注意一定要用一般过去时哦!

还有一类常考的作文题型就是书信，书信的格式更需要大家注意：

3rd April 2008

Dear Mr. I

How are you these days? I will go to shanghai for my holiday.

Yours truly，

Nancy

3、词汇：如果在文章中能够正确使用一些高级词汇和词组，而不再是简单词汇，这会让老

师耳目一新。例如：如果要孩子们来写holiday。很多孩子们一开始就会写I went to …… last year. 用went就很大众化了，但是如果用take a trip这个词组就会显得你的英语水平跟其他人不一样了!对于词汇这个点，我向孩子们提两点建议：

(1)词汇需要平时积累，但是大家积累的时候一定要注意灵活使用学过的词。大家已经学过很多词组和单词了，可是大家都不会拿出来用，原因就是在于大家学的时候只记得了它的意思，没有认识该怎么使用，该在什么情况下使用。所以大家以后学习词汇的时候一定要翻翻词典学习例句，自己也拿来造个句子，要知道自己以后该怎么用。

(2)学习语言并不是纸上谈兵，练习写作也应该要多加练习。熟能生巧，练得多了，自然也就会知道什么时候用什么词，该怎么写作文了。

4、书写：这一点看似不重要，却最影响老师对你作文的整体评价。我们不要求要做到美观，但那是一定要整洁、认真。这样老师也能很快读懂你的文章，更能对你作文产生好的印象。

Some people are in favor of the idea of doing X. They point out the fact that 支持X 的第一个原因。They also argue that 支持X 的另一个原因。

However, other people stand on a different ground. They consider it harmful to do X. They firmly point out that 反对X 的第一个理由。 An example can give the details of this argument: 一个例子。

There is some truth in both arguments. But I think the advantages of X overweigh the disadvantages. In addition to the above-mentioned negative effects it might bring about, X also may X 的有一个坏处。

There is a widespread concern over the issue that __作文题目_____. But it is well known that the opinion concerning this hot topic varies from person to person. A majority of people think that _ 观点一________. In their views there are 2 factors contributing to this attitude as follows: in the first place, ___原因一_______.Furthermore, in the second place, ___原因二_____. So it goes without saying that ___观点一_____.

People, however, differ in their opinions on this matter. Some people hold the idea that ___观点二_______. In their point of view, on the one hand， ___原因一_______. On the other hand, ____原因二_____. Therefore, there is no doubt that ___观点二______.

As far as I am concerned, I firmly support the view that __观点一或二______. It is not only because ________, but also because _________. The more _______, the more ________.

导入句：

At present, Currently, Recently, Nowadays, a critical issue/problem/phenomenon has become the concern/attention of the public / has been brought into the focus / has aroused a wide concern of the public.

It is becoming increasingly popular for people to….. There is a growing tendency these days for students to…..

With the rapid/amazing/remarkable/steady development (advance, improvement, progress) of….., great changes have taken place.

With the increasingly rapid process of globalization (urbanization, internationalization, commercialization), ……

At present, nowadays, currently, there has been a heated (popular) discussion/debate on (over, concerning) …….

Scientific researches have shown that ……. According to a survey,…..

Plentiful evidence has shown/proved that?.. 中心论句：同意

Frankly speaking, I am in favor of / agree with …..

As far as I am concerned, I am in favor of the point of ….. From my point of view, I support the statement above.

Straightforwardly, I cannot accept the point of……, and I strongly support the statement of …..

提高英语写作分数的88个词组

1.经济的快速发展 the rapid development of economy

2.人民生活水平的显著提高/ 稳步增长the remarkable improvement/ steady growth of people’s living standard

3.先进的科学技术 advanced science and technology

4.面临新的机遇和挑战 be faced with new opportunities and challenges 5.人们普遍认为 It is commonly believed/ recognized that? 6.社会发展的必然结果 the inevitable result of social development

7.引起了广泛的公众关注 arouse wide public concern/ draw public attention 8.不可否认 It is undeniable that?/ There is no denying that? 9.热烈的讨论/ 争论 a heated discussion/ debate 10. 有争议性的问题 a controversial issue 11.完全不同的观点 a totally different argument

12.一些人?而另外一些人? Some people? while others? 13. 就我而言/ 就个人而言 As far as I am concerned, / Personally, 14.就?达到绝对的一致 reach an absolute consensus on?

15.有充分的理由支持 be supported by sound reasons 16.双方的论点 argument on both sides

17.发挥着日益重要的作用 play an increasingly important role in? 18.对?必不可少 be indispensable to ? 19.正如谚语所说 As the proverb goes: 20.?也不例外?be no exception

21.对?产生有利/不利的影响 exert positive/ negative effects on? 22.利远远大于弊 the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages。 23.导致，引起 lead to/ give rise to/ contribute to/ result in 24.复杂的社会现象 a complicated social phenomenon

25.责任感 / 成就感 sense of responsibility/ sense of achievement 26. 竞争与合作精神 sense of competition and cooperation 27. 开阔眼界 widen one’s horizon/ broaden one’s vision 28.学习知识和技能 acquire knowledge and skills

29.经济/心理负担 financial burden / psychological burden 30.考虑到诸多因素 take many factors into account/ consideration 31. 从另一个角度 from another perspective 32.做出共同努力 make joint efforts

33. 对?有益 be beneficial / conducive to? 34.为社会做贡献 make contributions to the society 35.打下坚实的基础 lay a solid foundation for? 36.综合素质 comprehensive quality 37.无可非议 blameless / beyond reproach 39.致力于/ 投身于 be committed / devoted to?

40. 应当承认 Admittedly,

41.不可推卸的义务 unshakable duty 42. 满足需求 satisfy/ meet the needs of? 43.可靠的信息源 a reliable source of information 44.宝贵的自然资源 valuable natural resources

45.因特网 the Internet (一定要由冠词，字母I 大写) 46.方便快捷 convenient and efficient

47.在人类生活的方方面面 in all aspects of human life

48.环保(的) environmental protection / environmentally friendly 49.社会进步的体现 a symbol of society progress

50.科技的飞速更新 the ever-accelerated updating of science and technology 51.对这一问题持有不同态度 hold different attitudes towards this issue 52.支持前/后种观点的人 people / those in fovor of the former/ latteropinion 53.有/ 提供如下理由/ 证据 have/ provide the following reasons/ evidence 54.在一定程度上 to some extent/ degree / in some way 55. 理论和实践相结合 integrate theory with practice 56. ?必然趋势 an irresistible trend of?

57.日益激烈的社会竞争 the increasingly fierce social competition 58.眼前利益 immediate interest/ short-term interest 59.长远利益. interest in the long run

60.?有其自身的优缺点? has its merits and demerits/ advantages and disadvantages

61.扬长避短 Exploit to the full one’s favorable conditions and avoid unfavorable ones

62.取其精髓，取其糟粕 Take the essence and discard the dregs。 63.对?有害 do harm to / be harmful to/ be detrimental to 64.交流思想/ 情感/ 信息 exchange ideas/ emotions/ information

65.跟上?的最新发展 keep pace with / catch up with/ keep abreast with the latest development of ?

66.采取有效措施来? take effective measures to do sth 67.?的健康发展 the healthy development of ? 68.有利有弊 Every coin has its two sides。 No garden without weeds。

69.对?观点因人而异 Views on ?vary from person to person。 70.重视 attach great importance to? 71.社会地位 social status

72.把时间和精力放在?上 focus time and energy on? 73.扩大知识面 expand one’s scope of knowledge 74.身心两方面 both physically and mentally

75.有直接/间接关系 be directly / indirectly related to?

76. 提出折中提议 set forth a compromise proposal

77. 可以取代“think”的词 believe, claim, maintain, argue, insist, hold the opinion/ belief that

78.缓解压力/ 减轻负担 relieve stress/ burden 79.优先考虑/发展? give (top) priority to sth。 80.与?比较 compared with?/ in comparison with 81. 相反 in contrast / on the contrary。 82.代替 replace/ substitute / take the place of

83.经不起推敲 cannot bear closer analysis / cannot hold water 84.提供就业机会 offer job opportunities 85. 社会进步的反映 mirror of social progress 86.毫无疑问 Undoubtedly, / There is no doubt that? 87.增进相互了解 enhance/ promote mutual understanding 88.充分利用 make full use of / take advantage of

1. a big headache令人头痛的事情

2. a fraction of 一部分

3. a matter of concern 焦点

4. a series of 一系列,一连串above all 首先,尤其是

5. absent from不在,缺席

6. abundant in富于

7. account for 解释

8. accuse sb. of sth.控告

9. add to增加(add up to)

10. after all 毕竟,究竟

11. agree with同意

12. ahead of time / schedule提前

13. ahead of 在...之前(ahead of time 提前)

14. alien to与...相反

15. all at once 突然,同时

16. all but 几乎;除了...都

17. all of a sudden 突然

18. all over again 再一次,重新

19. all over 遍及

20. all right 令人满意的;可以

21. all the same 仍然,照样的

22. all the time 一直,始终

23. angry with sb. at/about sth.生气,愤怒

24. anxious about/for忧虑,担心

25. anything but 根本不

26. apart from 除...外

27. appeal to 吸引，申诉，请求

28. applicable to适用于

29. apply to适用

30. appropriate for/to适当,合适

说起写作技巧，作者倒是有一些可以分享给大家，希望可以对大家有帮助，也希望写作不好的同学们不要放弃，再接再厉。

其实写作并没有什么方法可以去探讨，所谓多读，多写，多想。多读，这就是今天我要告诉大家的一个方法。

所谓多读，无非是读一些书籍，可选书无疑变成了难题，很多人可能会认为读书就要读名著，否则不如不读，这其实一个错误的观点，首先众多的名著在在乎事物的本质，一般的学生会对其提不起太大的兴趣。第二想提高写作说平读名著是万万行不通的。女孩子的话应多读一些有艺术性气息的文学作品，无论是小说还是其他也好对写作水平都会有极大的帮助。因为每一本书都有着我们应学的一些优点，而并非只有名著才是我们该读的。男孩子则喜欢看一些武侠等一些热血小说，那这种书籍对写作水平是有益还是有害呢？答案也是有益的，书中自有黄金屋，既然是书籍就有其独特之处，否则又怎样才能吸引住读者的目光呢？而我们所缺少的，要学习的也是这些。

总之，读呢，要选择自己愿意看的一些书籍，将其精华吸取，成为自己的东西，才能真正的将写作说平提高。

四级作文考查的是写作的基本功，其准确用词包括三重含义：一是书写正确，即拼写和大小写等无误；二是词义正确，即所用的词确定能表达自己的意图；三是用法正确，包括词的语法搭配关系和意义搭配关系等。

选词的标准是：所选的词应该准确达意，通俗易懂，并符合英语的表达习惯。选词的重要性我们不再赘述，这里我们着重介绍由于用词不当而造成的错误现象。错误现象的成因很多，而形近词的误用是出错的重要原因之一。比如：有个美国学生在作文中这样写道：My goal in life is to be a success, and when I retire I want to devote my money to philandering。这个学生把最后一个词弄错了，他原来想说的词是philanthropy，结果意思相差十万八千里。

下面我们从句子和段落两方面，通过具体实例来说明选词在短文写作中的重要性，以及因为选词不当而造成的错误现象。

【例1】 Good study habits attributed to his performance on tests。

【分析】该句中的attributed to意为把归于；认为是的原因，用在这是不符合句意的。我们知道contribute to意为助于；促成，所以这里是因词义混淆而产生的句子的逻辑错误。

【更正】Good study habits contribute to his performance on tests。

[四级考试写作选词方法与技巧

☆定语和状语（时间、地点等）都属于附加成分，在基本句型中一般都不列出。

☆时态包含于句子中，任何句子都有时态。

1主语＋谓语(不及物动词)：S+V

It will rain tomorrow.

He often runs in the morning.

They cried.

Tom exercises every day.

2主语＋谓语(及物动词)＋宾语：S+V+O

I miss my mother very much.

She wants to go home now.

The English club is going to hold an English party.

They all love her.

3主语＋系动词＋表语：S+V+P

The music sounds wonderful.

The leaves have turned red.

She is a student.

We keep silent about that.

4主语＋谓语(及物动词)＋间接宾语（人）＋直接宾语（物）：S+V+IO+DO

The teacher gave a book to him.=The teacher gave him a book.

They told me an interesting story.

The waitress offered me a bottle of wine.

My father will buy me a bike.=My father will buy a bike for me.

Miss Smith teaches us English.

5主语＋谓语(及物动词)＋宾语＋宾语补足语：                                      S+V+O+C

They call me Xiao Wang.

I saw him swimming in the river.

We elected him monitor of the class.

【论文摘要】在高考英语试题中，写作是有效提高学生整体成绩的重要手段，写作是目的也是为了测试学生直接运用英语表达的能力而设置的，因此通常都会放在试卷的最后面作为压轴题出现。在高考英语写作要求中，明确提出要让考生运用所学知识进行书写，能组词成句、组句成文，语句符合英语语法和习惯。在写出的书面材料中，要求达到：切中题意，文理通顺，语言准确，得当。那么，怎样才能在高考英语写作中出类拔萃呢？这正是本文要探讨的内容。

一、有的放矢，了解高考英语写作要点

要对高考英语写作的题型及内容有所了解，才能把握好高考英语写作的考点，在此基础上才能找到行之有效的对策及方法。纵观近几年各省高考英语试题中，写作测试的命题思路，有一种从指导性写作逐步向半开放式写作过渡的趋势。半开放式写作，具体地说，就是给考生们提供一定的材料(包括图、文或图文结合)然后要求学生根据材料来进行书面表达，这样的考题形式，既限制了考生随心所欲的思维，又给予考生适当的发挥空间。这种命题方式能较好地考查考生的语言组织能力、书面表达能力以及思维能力。而在文体方面，记叙文、议论文、应用文及书信为最常见的写作题材。因此，我们可以做一个形象的比喻，写文章就像工厂里制造一台机器那样，首先要确定机器由几部分组成，然后对这几部分分别细化，形成初步的设计图；再根据要求对初步的设计图进行完善、补充、修改，随之形成最终的设计图；然后我们再按照图纸的设计，使用我们所掌握的零件去制造出机器；同样的道理，学生写作时可参照以下模式：

1．理解话题：学生在动笔前必须对指定的话题进行反复细读，认真思考，理解其真正的含义，了解出题者的意图，这是进行写作的第一步；

2．明确文体，确定人称时态：这一阶段的判断中，主要强调近十年高考最常见的两种文体：(1)说明文：必须按照事物的原貌加以说明、介绍、解释，常采用一般现在时，被动语态也常使用；(2)记叙文：通常采用第一人称，描述本人的经历或耳闻目睹之事；或用第三人称讲述他人的事情，如果是过去的事情，要用过去时。

3．初拟提纲，再理解话题：明确文体的基础上，草拟写作提纲；提纲是文章的骨架，可以是一句活，也可以是一个词组，由于考试时间所限，提纲内容不必面面俱到，但必须体现文章的整体结构和思路；目前绝大部分高中学生在英语写作时，还习惯于使用母语进行构思，然后将构思好的中文内容翻译成英文，这种情况是正常的；关键在于翻译过程中的语言表达必须符合英语语言的表达习惯

4．开始写作：提纲完成后，应根据提纲充实内容，如果说提纲是骨架的话，那么这时你必须将骨架填充血肉；具体的说就是要扩展要点，连词成句，适当地变换句型，组句谋篇成文；注意应简明扼要，层次分明、用词准确、语法概念清楚，使文章更具说服力，然后在写作完成后，还要对文章进行快速的检查，减少单词的拼写错误和句子表达的错误。

二、高考英语写作指导的具体策略

根据以上对历年高考英语写作试题的分析，我们可以从以下三个方面去指导学生进行写作：

1．细读材料，认真审题

仔细阅读书面表达题所给材料的全部内容，准确理解题目要求。需要认真审查的内容有：(1)文章的开头和结尾是否已给出；(2)用第几人称写作，书面表达要求中会明确指出使用第一人称还是第三人称；(3)提供的情景是图画、图表，还是提纲，如果是连环画，要注意故事情节的连贯性，确定合理的情节发展；(4)是否提供参考词汇，如果提供有参考词汇，写作中最好要用到；(5)采用什么文体，如果是议论文，要有论点、论据和结论三部分。如果是应用文，要注意其格式。如果是记叙文，要抓住六个要素：时间、地点、人物、事件、事情起因、事情的发展与结果。

2．恰当选择词语和句式

认真审题后，就可以列提纲了，将重点单词、短语、句型写在提纲里，关于选词切忌使用生僻词语，要求做到用词准确、得体、达意。选择句式时，尽量使用多种句式，如强调句、倒装句、各种名词性从句、定语从句、状语从句和固定句型等，长句和短句视情况交错使用，这样可以提高文章的档次，使文章生辉。

选词大多是在一组同义词或近义词之间进行。例如，我们要表达“好”这个意思，一般来说，大家会马上想起“good”，因为口语中我们经常说agoodfriend、goodluck、agoodpicture等。但是，在不同的短语中，可以选择不同的英语单词使表达更加准确、生动、形象。

3．多背常识性语句，扩大知识面

语言是有规律的，不同体裁的书面表达都有其常识性语句。如果同学们平时有大量的语句积累，在写作时就能把积累的东西调动起来。这些常识性语句既可增加文章的连贯性、逻辑性和可读性，同时还能提供地道的表达方式。写人物介绍时，应着重写人物的姓名、性别、年龄、职业、身高、健康状况、业余爱好、工作态度、与人相处和社会评价等语句。例如：lipingisagoodteacher，whoisthirtyyearsold．heis175centimetrestallandheishealthy．等。

【参考文献】

[1]韩金龙，秦秀白.体裁分析与体裁教学法.[j].外语界2000(1)

[2]韩金龙.英语写作教学:过程体裁教学法.[j].外语界.2001(4)

[3]何星.“过程写作法”较之“结果写作法”在高中英语写作教学中的

有效性研究.[d]华东师大专业硕士学位论文.2007

歌声！微笑！她和她。是他们陪我走过童年的美好时光。

“宝宝乖乖，宝宝睡睡······”“外婆我已经16岁了，不用唱这首歌了”不知道外婆从哪里学来这首连调子都算不上的“催眠曲”仿佛从我记事开始每当睡觉时外婆就会唱这首曲。小的时候总觉得有很大的作用所以每当外婆唱起这首曲子我就会进入梦乡但是现在却怎么也习惯不了，有时会觉得很烦。“孙女，这可是你小时侯最爱听的······”“外婆，够了哦！我现在已经长大了”看着外婆有点落寞的表情，我有点后悔说那样的话。“行！外婆不唱了，孙女我问你你想你奶奶了吗？”

“奶奶······”

想一想奶奶已经去世三年了，说不想恐怕是假的吧！记得以前的奶奶老爱对我笑每当妈妈把我从外婆家送到奶奶家时奶奶就笑！什么都不说就笑！那时我觉得奶奶忒傻动不动就笑。可是也就是他的笑陪伴我走过了几乎整个童年。

可是有一天奶奶不再笑了。一场车祸带走了奶奶和她的笑。想想当时我们三个孩子拉着肇事者的衣服哭着，喊着，打着。因为我们爱奶奶，爱我们的奶奶和她的笑，可是奶奶就这么走了

跪在奶奶的遗像前，望着黑白照片里的奶奶，望着还在笑的奶奶我觉得奶奶没有离开。

“哎哟！我的乖孙女你怎么哭了啊！从思绪中回来才发现我的眼角已经被侵湿了。看着眼前的外婆，突然觉得他是那么重要。

“外婆！你不会离开我的对吧！”

“傻丫头，外婆怎么会离开你呢！”

“宝宝乖乖，宝宝睡睡······”歌声再次响起，梦里我看见了奶奶他在对我笑。

首先，必须明确一个散文写作观念，即散文的唯一内容和对象是作者的感情体验。有了散文的内在结构——感情体验，只要再明确外在结构的核心就可以写好散文。外在结构的核心是细节。散文和小说一样，建立在细节的描写和叙述的基础上，但细节的排列组合方式不同。可以说，小说组合细节是“以盘盛珠”，而散文则是“以线穿珠”。小说的“盘”是一个社会的横切面，具备冲突，各种阶层、力量的人物或隐或显，而细节只能在这样的“盘”中有机地展开。散文的“线”，就是感情体验，或多或少，随手拈来，任情挥洒——以感情体验的表现为准。由此，我们说散文(应称艺术散文)，是最自由的文体，散漫如水，手法灵活。

只要弄清这些，写真实自我及由此生发的个性口语、感情体验和细节描写，就掌握了散文写作的要领，什么章法(如文眼)、意境等等一般化认识都不必过于拘谨地学习，其他文体理论知识和写作基础理论都会讲到。

散文主要分为记叙散文和抒情散文(仍按传统的不明确的说法)两种。下面将两种散文的模式列出，供初学者和高等教育应试者选择使用。

一、记叙文的抒情技巧

1.细微之处见真诚

作文中如果能抓住体现真情的“动情点”，则能达到“一瞬传情，一目传神”的艺术效果。如优秀作文《零距离》一文片段——

儿时，我与父亲形影不离。渐渐地，我长大了，父女俩的交流却越来越少，就像一片水塘旱成了草地，又荒成了沙漠。但即便面对我的冷漠，父亲的爱也从未间断过，小时候的一声声叮咛，长大后的一条条短信，织成了密密的父爱。而我却麻木了一般，竟从未对父亲表示过感谢……

想到这里，我的面颊滚烫，终于，我发了一条短信“:爸，那边很冷吧?小心自己的胃，注意保暖!”放下手机，我竟感觉如释重负，特别踏实。不一会儿，父亲便回了短信“:谢谢乖女儿，即使天再冷，爸爸的心也是暖的”。

本文通过“我”给父亲发完短信后如释重负等细节描写形象地表达了“我”对父亲的愧疚，同时也侧面表现了父女之间深深的爱。

2.叙议结合点情理

记叙文，如果能在叙述描写后适当地抒情、议论，则是一种极好的点染，这样既可以使细节得以点化，情感得以渲染，又可以使主题得到升华，起到震撼人心的效果。如优秀作文《那一束阳光》一文片段——

我无力地走着，路仿佛格外漫长，突然，一束阳光强烈地刺痛我的双眼，这是多美的一景啊！太阳挣扎着想逃脱于地平线的束缚，那是一种不愿服输的性格啊！在阴云的笼罩下，太阳的光芒逐渐消失，取代它的只是令人恐惧的阴影。难道太阳还是无法战胜那无边的黑暗势力？然而，我想错了，一缕缕微光再次展现出来，它拼命地履行着那份执着，“皇天不负有心人”，阳光洋洋洒洒地洒向每一个角落，阴云屈服了！

我顿时醒悟过来，自己的境遇和这景不也很相似吗？原来自己不过是没认清自己。

本段先记叙自己的所见所闻，然后再议论点睛，这样既揭示记叙的主旨，又增强了抒情效果。

二、议论文的抒情技巧

1.推心置腹、变换人称

为倾吐内心难以抑制的强烈感情，考生在论述时可巧妙地变换人称，将对素材客观冷静地转述变换为与“你”直接对话。如优秀作文《流放出生命的精彩》一文片段——

终于到了西安，再向西行便再也看不到城墙的影子了，本应该继续西行，你却病倒了。大病之中，你想到了西湖上的苏堤，想到了那“竹杖芒鞋轻胜马，谁怕?一蓑烟雨任平生”的苏轼；想到了“为官一任，造福一方”的韩愈……于是，你又疾步西行，奔赴那原本是苦难现在却成了机遇的贬谪之地。你号召人们开垦荒田，加大生产；供水不足，你便带领人们开渠挖沟……经过你的努力，原本处于荒蛮状态下的伊犁人民填饱了肚子，改善了生存条件，逐步摆脱了蒙昧，思想受到了教育，社会风气也得到了很大的改善。

作者在对林则徐这则经典素材的处理上，变客观、冷静地转述为采取第二人称与林则徐直接对话，直抒胸臆，情意盎然。

2.走进材料、文中有“我”

所谓“走进材料，文中有我”就是在材料中融入我之情感，我之独到见解，从而将“我”与素材做到完美的统一。如优秀作文《德耀中华》一文片段——

华夏三国鼎立，孙权有谋，曹操有才，刘备有德。然而在青史竹帛中，最为人称道，流芳百世的，是有“德”之人。因为“德”，五虎大将甘于献命，蜀国百姓也甘于与之出生入死。再看看二战后的德国，当德国总理在世人面前惊天一跪时，我看到了一个经济腾飞的德国。道德让一个国家站得高昂，不仅在经济上，更在于立足世界的底气上。

然而，我只叹，在今天的天空下，道德似乎缺少了以前的闪耀。前几年的“周老虎”一事闹得沸沸扬扬，似乎成了揭露社会道德缺失的伤疤。再后来，毒胶囊，速成鸡，大学校长的假论文……我不禁质问，物欲面前，道德真的那么不堪一击吗？

本段与一般议论文的最大区别就是在论证的过程中，将“我”之感受始终贯穿全文。如此呈现素材，新颖；如此抒情，真挚。

一篇优秀的中考作文之所以能从数百万份试卷中脱颖而出，其中必有他值得称赞之处。按照评分标准而言，一般会从选材，立意，语言和结构这样几个方面去衡量，这四个标准里，其中最为阅卷老师欣赏也最让学生头痛的是作文的立意，一边羡慕于别人标新立异的思路，一边又苦于自己落入俗套的构思，这成为很多学生作文档次上升的一个障碍。其实，创新立意并不是天马行空，而是有所根据的，它的根据就来源于卷面已经给出的题目，从审题入手去分析出题人的意图，从审题入手去挖掘更深邃的含义，如何审题审出新意，这是我们接下来几篇连载要集中解决的问题。

第一讲主要解决的是审题方法的问题，创新的前提是审准题，在准确的基础上才能有所新，如果题目审偏了，立意再好也是妄谈，所以首先要解决的问题是如何正确审题。

(一)短题要补充

很多题目我们看起来很简洁，不过三五字，但其实题目越短，审题难度越大，因为它能够给与我们的信息是极为有限的，很多时候让人感觉难以下手，这时我们可以用补充题目的方式让题目变得具体充实有可写性起来。

如写《雪》这样一篇文章

1、在前补充：冬雪，看雪，洁白的雪

2、前后补充：瑞雪兆丰年，冬雪也暖人，风雪中的身影

3、在后补充：雪后，雪的温度，雪的诉说

再如以《朋友》为题写一篇文章

1、在前补充：真诚的朋友，执着的朋友，诚信的朋友，我最敬佩的朋友

2、前后补充：我的朋友叫自信，这个朋友值得尊敬

3、在后补充：朋友的心愿，朋友的真谛，朋友的故事

需要注意的是，补充题目这件事是在我们脑海中完成的，也就是说如果题目中没有要求我们去补充完整题目，那么我们就不要随便改动题目，只是在心中把你要写的内容通过给题目补充，进一步缩小即可，如果补充题目的过程中发现脑海中想出的好几个题目都还不错，怎样取舍呢?这时，可以选择你最熟悉的那个话题，或者你认为最有话可说感触最深的那个去写。

(二)长题抓关键

题目长了有时也会干扰我们审题，原因很简单，各个独立出来的词你不知道到底哪一个是题目的核心，这时就需要抓住题目的关键词去分析，而关键词就是我们平时所说的题眼，我们一般会选择动词，形容词和副词作为题眼，因为这些一般是起修饰和强调作用的，当然题目的主要对象一般是名词，这个是不容忽视的，但是关键是要看修饰它的那个词是什么，你要围绕那个词写什么。

如《这件事教育了我》中的“教育”，《其实并不是这样的》中的“并不是”，《**也美丽》中的“也”，《水仙花开》中的“开”。

(三)标志定体裁

有些题目常带有明显的体裁标志，可帮助我们迅速确定文章的体裁，内容和重点。

1、记叙文的标志：题目中凡带有“记”“忆”“人”“事”“见闻”等字眼，一般都是记叙文。如《回忆我的母亲》《记我的同桌》《值得赞美的人》《假期见闻》《我的初中生活》等。

2、抒情散文的标志：题目中凡有“赞”“颂”“赋”等字眼，一般都是托物言志，借景抒情的散文。如《白杨礼赞》《绿叶颂》《茶花赋》等。

3、说明文的标志：题目中凡带有“制作”“介绍”“说明”“自述”“为什么”“原理”“话”，或直接写某事物的名称，一般应写成说明文，如《文具盒的自述》《森林为什么能防风》《手表的使用和原理》《秋天话菊花》等。

4、议论文的标志：题目中凡是带有“说”“议”“谈”“论”“评”“辩”“驳”“从……谈起”“从……说开去”“读……有感”等字眼，一般都是说明文，如《谈骨气》《由‘滴水石穿’想到的》《读有感》等。

(四)联想化深意

联想就是由甲想到乙，而甲一般是由实际意义的，乙是有象征意义的。

如《圆月》《白杨》《长城颂》《我心中的阳光》就需要用联想法来审题，把这些大家在生活中熟悉的事物与一些具有象征意义的事物联系起来，从而给这个题目赋予更深层的含义。比如：“圆月”联想到中华同胞，“白杨”联想到扎根边疆的志愿者，“长城”联想到战无不胜的人民解放军，“阳光”需要联想温暖，亲情，关爱，希望甚至信仰，这样通过审题文章的寓意就大大深化了。

完成正确审题后，接下去几讲我们会结合具体题目来给同学们分析，如何通过审题来创新立意，请同学们继续关注。

[初中/高中作文如何在审题中创新立意的写作指导

导入：

第1段：提出一种现象或某个决定作为议论的话题

As a student, I am strongly in favour of the decision. (亮明自己的观点是赞成还是反对)

The reasons for this may be listed as follows. (过渡句，承上启下)

正文：

第2段：First of all... Secondly... Besides...(列出2~3个赞成或反对的理由)

结论：

第3段：In conclusion, I believe that... (照应第1段，构成"总—分—总"结构)

4."How to"类议论文模板：

导入：

第1段：提出一种现象或某种困难作为议论的话题

正文：

第2段：Many ways can help to solve this serious problem, but the following may be most effective. First of all... Another way to solve the problem is ... Finally...(列出2~3个解决此类问题的办法)

结论：

第3段：These are not the best but the only two/ three measures we can take. But it should be noted that we should take action to...(强调解决此类问题的根本方法)

写作的文学底蕴的差距的确是没有办法在短时期内弥补的，但是学生可以用技巧来弥补才华的不足，下面是小编整理的高考作文写作高分技巧，一起来看看！

一：作文要注重真情，把握真实是关键

构思是文章的骨架，内容是血肉，而情感则是神经。阅卷老师认为文章不是无情物，一篇好文章，就应该具有良好的情感态度，换言之，即使文章的内容很平实，但情感却足够真挚，就像朱自清先生的《背影》，同样也能憾人心魄。在考场作文中，写人记事发议论，心中饱藏真情，让现实生活的境与溢出纸外的真情相呼应，则自成佳境。没有情感的境，如同行尸走肉，令人生厌。用真情关照生活，虽一花一草，一人一物，也熠熠生辉!

二：开头结尾要简练，最好首尾两行半

大头作文要不得。除非特殊情况，建议考生在写作文的时候，开头结尾占两行半的格子，顶多不能超过三行半。

三：动笔之前要拟题，漂亮标题如美女

准备题目的办法有2个，你可以去网络上搜索作文题目，归纳作文老师讲述的类似技巧;二是翻阅最近一年的《读者》或《青年文摘》等杂志，根据题材选择一些比较精彩的标题，记下来，也许考试的时候灵光一现可以类比运用。

四：适当克隆和借鉴，考前备课攒信息

考试前，建议考生翻阅大量的范文，积累一些佳作的结构。如果写记叙文，最好翻阅《读者》和《青年文摘》，其中一些散文的结构是很好的，适当对其归纳总结，到考试的时候，你采用别人的筐，把自己的东西向里面装就可以了。

另外要关注去年至今年的社会热点。

五：篇幅争取要写满，多写一点是一点

一般来说，如果作文要求600字左右，那就顶多写到700字。如果是不低于多少字，建议考生合理安排卷面，把卷面写满到95%左右。

有人问：考试作文如果不限文体，那么写诗歌，写顺口溜，写三句半行不行?这个谁也不敢作主，你无法揣测阅卷老师的标准，冒险的收益也许只留给准备最充分的人。

六：动笔之前不要慌，想好题目列提纲

列提纲很关键。比如写记叙文，要设计好开头结尾，同时要把你叙述的事情分成几个层次，中间如果能设置一个过渡句或过渡段更好。

一个训练有素的考生，列提纲大约需要5~8分钟。如果时间紧张，提纲可以简练些。

七：作文成绩看字迹，得分要素是第一

任何形式的作文考试，阅卷老师在打分时，第一眼看的是字迹。因此，必须要把字写好，不需要多美，但一定不要潦草。

八：考试作文五六段，干净整洁看卷面

考试作文要注意分段，三四个段落有些少，八九个段落则显得琐碎。除非有特殊情况，段落应以五六个为好。切忌在一段中写八九行字，写成大肚子作文，这样会让阅卷老师产生视觉疲劳。

九：想好主题和文体，非驴非马不可取

无论记叙文还是议论文，一般来说，多是总分总结构。议论文最好是131或者141结构，当然也可以灵活地采用夹叙夹议的手法。注意，议论文不能说了那么多事例却不归纳主题，而记叙文不能议论过多而忘记说事例。

十：作文首尾要精彩，丰富多彩出亮点

考试作文的开头方法很多：六要素开头法、题记开头法、悬念开头法、引名句开头法、排比句开头法、拟人式开头法、设问式开头法、对偶式开头法、合用修辞开头法、巧述典故开头法、解题式开头法、诗文引用开头法希望考生们准备好一些关于道德、学习、礼仪、爱国、美德等方面的典故、名人名言，用得上。

一般来说，结尾是总结全文。如果是记叙文，要注意抒情;如果是议论文，要注意归纳。无论如何，最好要扣准标题。

下面的材料旨在丰富学生在是非问题写作方面的思想和语言，考生在复习时可以先分类阅读这些篇章，然后尝试写相关方面的作文题。

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。

因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！

1.?????? Proverbs

1. A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.

2. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.

3. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

4. The classroom--not the trench--is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.

5. Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

6. It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and intelligence to create our own destiny.

7. You see, real ongoing, lifelong education doesn’t answer questions; it provokes them.

8. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

9.the most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.

10. The essence of our efforts to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each as equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind, and spirit he or she possesses.

11. A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-he simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

12. If you can read and don’, you are an illiterate by choice.

2. Damaging Research

A study by National Parent-Teacher Organization revealed that in the average American school, eighteen negatives are identified for every positive that is pointed out. The Wisconsin study revealed that when children enter the first grade, 80 percent of them feel pretty good themselves, but by the time they get to the sixth grade, only 10 percent of them have good self-images.

3. Education and Citizenship

An important aspect of education in the United States is the relationship between education and citizenship. Throughout its history this nation has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity, and preparing new generations of citizens to function in society. In addition, the schools have been expected to help shape society itself. During the 1950s, for example, efforts to combat racial segregation focused on the schools. Later, when the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite, American schools and colleges came under intense pressure and were offered many incentives to improve their science and mathematics programs so that the nations would not fall behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological capabilities.

Education is often viewed as a tool for solving social problems, especially social inequality. The schools, t is thought, can transform young people from vastly different backgrounds into competent, upwardly mobile adults. Yet these goals seem almost impossible to attain. In recent years, in fact, public education has been at the center of numerous controversies arising from the gap between the ideal and the reality. Part of the problem is that different groups in society have different have different expectations. Some feel that children should be taught basic job-related skills; still others believe education should not only prepare children to compete in society but also help them maintain their cultural identity (and, in the case of Hispanic children, their language). On the other hand, policymakers concerned with education emphasize the need to increase the level of student achievement and to improve parents in their children’s education.

Some reformers and critics have called attention to the need to link formal schooling with programs designed to address social problems. Sociologist Charles Moscos, for example, is a leader in the movement to expand programs like the Peace Corps, Vista, and Outward Bound into a system of voluntary national service. National service, as Moscos defines it, would entail “the full-time undertaking of public duties by young people whether as citizen soldiers or civilian servers-who are paid subsistence wages” and serve for at least one year. In return for this period of service, the volunteers would receive assistance in paying for college or other educational expenses.

Advocates of national service and school-to-work programs believe that education does not have to be confined to formal schooling. In devising strategies to provide opportunities for young people to serve their society, they emphasize the educational value of citizenship experiences gained outside the classroom. At this writing there is little indication that national service will become a new educational institution in the United States, although the concept is steadily gaining support among educators and social critics.

4. The Teacher’s Role

Given the undeniable importance of classroom experience, sociologists have done a considerable amount of research on what goes on in the classroom. Often they start from the premise that, along with the influence of peers, students’ experiences in the classroom are of central importance to their later development. One study examined the impact of a single first-grade teacher on her students’ subsequent adult status. The surprising results of this study have important implications. It is evident that good teachers can make a big difference in children’s lives, a fact that gives increased urgency to the need to improve the quality of primary-school teaching. The reforms carried out by educational leaders like James Comer suggest that when good teaching is combined with high levels of parental involvement the results can be even more dramatic.

Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the students to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher’s authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like. Hence, much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction.

5. Education Philosophy

For the past fifty years our schools have operated on the theories of John Dewey (1859-1953), an American educator and writer. Dewey believed hat the school’s job was to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information, for which the child had no context, into him or her. In the Dewey system, the child becomes the active agent in his own education, rather than a passive receptacle for facts.

Consequently, American schools are very enthusiastic about teaching “life skills” –logical thinking, analysis, creative problem--solving. The actual content of the lessons is secondary to the process, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present, including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as an uncreative and somewhat vulgar.

In addition to “life skills”, schools are assigned to solve the ever growing stoke of social problems. Racism, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, reckless driving, and are just a few of the modern problems that have appeared on the school curriculum.

This all contributes to a high degree of social awareness in American youngsters.

6. Student Life

To the students, the most notable difference between elementary school and the higher levels is that in junior high they start “changing classes”. This means that rather than spending the day in one classroom, they switch classrooms to meet their different teachers. This gives them three or four minutes between classes in the hallways, where a great deal of the important social action of high school traditionally takes place. Students have lockers in these hallways, around which thy congregate.

Society in general does not take the business of studying very seriously. Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities—sports, clubs, cheerleading, scouts—supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc. those who don’t become engaged in such activities or have afterschool jobs have plenty of opportunity to “hang out”, listen to teenager music, and watch television.

Compared to other nations, American students do not have much homework. Studies also show that American parents have lower expectations for their children’s success in school than other nationalities do. (Historically, there has not been much correlation between American school success and success in later life.) “He’s just not a scholar”, the American parents might say, content that their son is on the swim team and doesn’t take drugs. (Some of the young do choose to study hard, for reason of their own, such as determining that the road to riches lies through Harvard Business School.)

What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each other—whether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of A’s and F’s (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all A’s looks too soft—so students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks.

Foreign students sometimes don’t understand that copying from other people’s papers or from books is considered wrong and taken seriously. Here, it is important to show that you have done your own work and are displaying your own knowledge. It is more important than helping your friends to pass, whom we think do not deserve to pass unless they can provide their own answers. Group effort goes against the competitive grain, and American students do not study together as many Asians do. Many Asians in this country consider their group study habits a large contributor to their school success.

7. Adult Education

After complaining about many aspects of American life, a 40-year-old woman from Hong Kong concluded, “But where else could someone my age go back to school and get a degree in social work? Here you can change your whole life, start a new business, do what you really want to do.”

So at least to this person, school requirements weren’t inhibiting. And to millions of others, adult education is the path to a new career, or if not to a new career, to a new outlook. Schools generally encourage the older person who wants to start anew, and besides regular classes, schedule evening classes in special programs. Today there are so many people of retirement age in college that it is no longer remarkable.

8. Moral Relativism in American

Improving American education requires not doing new things but doing (and remembering) some good old things. At the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson listed the requirements for a sound education in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. In this landmark statement on American education, Jefferson wrote of the importance of education and writing, and of reading history, and geography. But he also emphasized the need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” Jefferson believed education should aim at the improvement of both one’s “morals” and “faculties”. That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries. But a number of changes, most of them unsound, have diverted schools from these great pursuits. And the story of the loss of the school’s original moral mission explains a great deal.

Starting in the early seventies, “values clarification” programs started turning up in schools all over America. According to this philosophy, the schools were not to take part in their time-honored task of transmitting sound moral values; rather, they were to allow the child to “clarify” his own values (which adults, including parents, had no “rights” to criticize). The “values clarification” movement didn’t clarify values; it clarified wants and desires. This form of moral relativism said, in effect, that no set of values was right or wrong; everybody had an equal right to his own values; and all values were subjective, relative, and personal. This destructive view took hold with a vengeance.

In 1985 The York Times published an article quoting New York area educators, in slavish devotion to this new view, proclaiming, “They deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.” The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. In the course of that session a student concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return one thousand dollars she found in a purse at school. According to the article, when the youngsters asked the counselor’s opinion, “He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them. ‘If I come from the position of what is wrong,’ he explained, ‘then I’m not their counselor.’”

Once upon a time, a counselor offered counselor, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering “choices” or “options”.

In response to the belief that adults and educators should teach children sound morals, one can expect from some quarters indignant objections (I’ve heard one version of it expressed countless times over the years): “Who are you to say what’s important?” or “Whose standards and judgments do we use?”

The correct response, it seems to me, is, is we ready to do away with standards and judgments? Is anyone going to argue seriously that a life of cheating and swindling is as worthy as a life of honest, hard work? Is anyone (with the exception of some literature professors at our elite universities) going to argue seriously the intellectual corollary, that a Marvel comic book is as good as Macbeth? Unless we are willing to embrace some pretty silly position, we’ve got to admit the need for moral and intellectual standards. The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgment as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded “elitist” trying to impose his view on everybody else.

The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational things—that nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthless—we must ask the normative question. It may come, as a surprise to those who fell that to be “progressive” is to be value-neutral. But as Matthew Amold said, “the world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things” and if the world can’t decide what the best things are, at least to some degree, then it follows that progress, and character, is in trouble. We shouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things, some lives, books, ideas, and values are better than others. It is the responsibility of the schools to teach these better things.

At one time, we weren’t so reluctant to teach them. In the mid-nineteenth century, a diverse, widespread group of crusaders began to work for the public support of what was then called the “common school”, the forerunner of the public school. They were to be charged with the mission of school felt that the nation could fulfill its destiny only if every new generation was taught these values together in a common institution.

The leaders of the common school movement were mainly citizens who were prominent in their communities—businessmen, ministers, local civic and government officials. These people saw the schools as upholders of standards of individual morality and small incubators of civic and personal virtue; the founders of the public schools had faith that public education could teach good moral and civic character from a common ground of American values.

But in the past quarter century or so, some of the so-called experts became experts of value neutrality, and moral education was increasingly left in their hands. The commonsense view of parents and the publicthat schools should reinforce rather than undermine the values of home, family, and country, was increasingly rejected.

There are those today still that claim we are now too diverse a nation, that we consist of too many competing convictions and interests to instill common values. They are wrong. Of course we are a diverse people. We have always been a diverse people. And as Madison wrote in FederalistNo.10, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith. The explicit teaching of these values is the legacy of the common schools, and it is a legacy to which we must return.

9. Schools Should Teach Values

People often said, “Yes, we should teach these values, but how do we teach them?” this question deserves a candid response, one that isn’t given often enough. It is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will transmit to them a moral foundation. This happens when teachers and principals, by their words and actions, embody sound convictions. As Oxford’s Mary Warnock has written, “You cannot teach morality without being committed to morality yourself; and you cannot be committed to morality yourself without holding that some things are right and others wrong.” The theologian Martin Buber wrote that the educator is distinguished from all other influences “by his will to take part in the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he represents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what is, the selection of what is ‘right’, of what should be.” It is in this will, Buber says, in this clear standing for something, that the “vocation as an educator finds its fundamental expression.”

There is no escaping the fact that young people need as example principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.

As Education Secretary, I visited a class at Waterbury Elementary School in Waterbury, Vermont, and asked the students, “Is this a good school?” They answered, “Yes, this is a good school.” I asked them, “Why?” Among other things, one eight-year-old said, “The principal Mr. Riegel, makes good rules and everybody obeys them.” So I said, “Give me an example.” And another answered, “You can’t climb on the pipes in the bathroom. We don’t climb on the pipes and the principal doesn’t either.”

This example is probably too simple to please a lot of people who want to make the topic of moral education difficult, but there is something profound in the answer of those children, something education should pay more attention to. You can’t expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain must be said, certain limits lay down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.

We should also do a better job at curriculum selection. The research shows that most “values education” exercises and separate courses in “moral reasoning” tend not to affect children’s behavior; if anything, they may leave children morally adrift. Where to turn? I believe our literature and our history are a rich quarry of moral literacy. We should mine that quarry. Children should have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we believe to be right and wrong, good and bad—examples illustrating what are morally right and wrong can indeed be known and that there is a difference.

What kind of stories, historical events, and famous lives am I talking about? If we want our children to know about honesty, we should teach them about Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents and conversely, about Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf if we want them to know about courage, we should teach them about Joan of Arc, Horatius at the bridge, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. If we want them to know about persistence in the face of adversity, they should know about the voyages of Columbus and the character of Washington during the Civil War. And our youngest should be told about the Little Engine That Could. If we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: “No, I must submit to the decree of Athens.” If we want our children to respect the rights of others, they should read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’ “Letter from Birmingham jail.” From the Bible they should know about Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Jonathan’s friendship with David, the Good Samaritan’s kindness toward a stranger, and David’s cleverness and courage in facing Goliath.

These are only a few of the hundreds of examples we can call on. And we need not get into issues like nuclear war, abortion, creationism, or euthanasia. This may come as a disappointment to some people, but the fact is that the formation of character in young people is educationally a task different from, and prior to, the discussion of the great, difficult controversies of the day. First things come first. We should teach values the same way we teach other things: one step at a time. We should not use the fact that there are many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject.

After all, we do not argue against teaching physics because laser physics is difficult, against teaching American history because there are heated disputes about the Founders’ intent. Every field has its complexities and its controversies. And every field has its basics, its fundamentals. So they are too with forming character and achieving moral literacy. As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.

10. College Pressures

Mainly I try to remind that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don not want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now – that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

My wish, of course, is na?ve. One of the national gods venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, and the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains: only victims.

“In the late 1960s.” one dean told me. “The typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world’ or ‘how I can make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said: “They are trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are ready reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentleman’s C.” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I do not care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They cannot.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in American the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society has not yet caught up with this fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know tem in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to medical school?” I asked them.

“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and …”

Poor students, poor parents, they are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and draughts toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, “pre-rich.”

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-round person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”

Probably they won’t. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they are expected to do. A professor will assign five page papers. Several students will start writing ten page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic work, psychologically.”

Why cannot the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails onto a shrinking profession.

If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist-that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best paying slot.”

“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story; if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ‘60s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s students will one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell neither them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

11. To Err Is Wrong

In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateaus. This event drew a lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of reports covered Yaz’s every more. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all of this attention will go to your head?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at this way: in my career I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”?

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggest, an activity that produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy that generates good creative ideas also produces errors.

Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on “the right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

Right over 70% of the time = “C~” Right over 60% of the time = “D~” Less than 60% correct, you fail.

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.

Playing It Safe

With this kind of attitude, you aren’t going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a litter penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself to situation where you might fall. This leads to conservative thought pattern designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in Journalism. For the last six month, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked with her about situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail. She went through eighteen years of schooling to try any approaches where she might fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a potential stepping-stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and other people do you see who are to try anything new because of this failure? Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

Different Logic

From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousand of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend litter time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screw up, what went wrong this time?” the creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” and then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filed with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions that were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline engine efficiency. The problem he faced was“knockthe phenomenon in which gasoline takes too long to burn in the cylinder-thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to him, “How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” the key concept here is “early”. Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally, he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its’ red leaves, which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the red color, which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I make the gasoline red?” perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and, lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock”.

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

一、审题

我们拿到作文后第一件要做的事就是审题。审题的作用在于使你写作不跑题(如果跑题，条理和语言再好，也得不到及格分，甚至0分。)那末审题要审什麽呢?

1.体裁(议论文，说明文，描述文)

审题就是要审作文的题材和体裁。因为什末样的体裁就会用什末样的题材去写。那末体裁包括那些呢?它包括议论文，说明文和描述文。从近些年看，四级作文不是单一的体裁，而是几种体裁的杂合体。例如： Directions: For this part ,your are allowed 30 minutes to write a composition on the topicTrying to Be A Good University Student .You should write at least 100 words and you shouldbase your composition on the outline (given in Chinese ) below :

1.做合格大学生的必要性

2.做合格大学生的必备条件(可以从德智体方面谈)

3.我计划这样做

很多人说这种类型的作文是议论文。这是片面的，因为，第一段要求写"...必要性"，这说明本段体裁是议论文;第二段要求写"

...必备条件"，这说明本段要求写说明文;儿地三段要求写"...这样做"，这说明本段要求写描述文。所以在大多数情形下，四级作文是三种体裁的杂合体。

2.根据不同体裁确定写作方法

我们审题的目的就是根据不同体裁确定不同的写作方法。通过审题，我们可以看出四级作文大都是三段式。如上例第一段为议论体，第二段为说明体，地三段为描述体。而各种文体又不同的写作方式： 议论文;要有论点和论据，而且往往从正反两方面来论述。例如上面第一段的思路是：做合格大学生，会怎末样(这是从正面论述);不能做合格的大学生，会怎末样(从反面论述);所以我们要做合格的大学生(结了论)。

说明文：可以从几方面或几条来说明一个问题，就上作文而言，可以从方面(德智体)来说明合格大学生的必要性。

描述文：一"人"为中心描述一个"做"的过程。与上两段相比，本段的主语多为人称代词，他要与第二段相互应进行描述。 二 确定主题句

通过审题，我们知道该如何确定正确的写作思路。下边我们就谈如何些。第一部就是要写主题句。主题句是确保不跑题的前提，只有不跑题才有可得及格分。写主题句嘴保险的方法就是把中文提纲的各句译成英语。例如上述三段主题句分别为：

1.It is very necessary to be a good university student . (议论体的主题句)

2.There are several respects of necessities to be a good university student .(说明体的主题句)

3.What I will do in the future is the following .(描述体主题句)

如果要求句是英语就可以把它变成主题句，例如这样一篇作文：

Good Health

1.Importance of good health

2.Ways to keep fit

3.My own practice

这样的作文的要求句就可以扩充成主题句。扩充后三段的主题句分别为：

1.It is very important to have good health .(将名词 importance变成形容词important)

2.There are four ways to keep fit for me .(用 there be 句型)

3.My own practices are the following .(采用原词)

二、条理清楚

保证不跑提示写作当中第一任务，第二个重要任务就是要做到条理清楚。对于议论文来说，正反面要清楚，对于说明文来说条理要清楚，对于描述文来说，谁干什么要清楚。就拿上例Good health 来说，第一段保持正反面要清楚救应这样写：正面(With good health ,we can...)，反面(Without good health ,we cando nothing .We cant do...)

为了使文章更具有条理性，我们可以用first(ly) second(ly) third(ly)等副词，他们可以是文章的条例性更加突出。作文是主观题，想得告分就必须引起老师的主意，老师的时间很短(每篇作文只有一两分钟就要阅完)，所以我们在列调试最好不用: To be with,... after that ,...And then, ... The next , ... Thefollowing , ... As last ... 。因为用这样的词语不利于老师看出你作文的条理性。

三、保证作文符合字数要求的十二句作文法

考生一般都希望作文达到字数而又不至于写得太多，因为写得太多一方面暴露自己语言上的弱点，另一方面又会占用过多的时间。写得太多还易跑题，一个有效的方法就是十二句作文法。

我们知道，四级作文都是三段式。我们算一下，如果我们在每一段中写上四句，即主题句加两三句扩展句和一个结论句就可以了。这样全片在十二句左右，每一句十多个词，就又120-150个字。大家可以试图找一些作文题练一练。

JK Rowling, who is one of the most well-known writers in the world, was born in Gwent on July 31, 1965.

She is famous for her Harry Potter fantasy series, which have been sold more than 400 million copies and adapted for popular movies.

As the first person to become a billionaire by writing books in the world, JK Rowling was ranked as the 48th most powerful celebrity by Forbes, and she was named “The Most Influential Woman in Britain” in October 2010. What’s worth mentioning is that she gives much of her wealth and time to charity, who sets agood example to other famous people.

我们的春节是中国人一年中的第一个传统佳节，它标志旧的一年结束，新的一年已经开始。年夜饭，是春节的重要活动之一，中国的百姓家庭对年夜饭极为重视。正月初二，我和爸爸妈妈一起到奶奶家吃年夜饭。

在今天来的人特别多，奶奶家显得格外热闹，年味超浓。姑姑、叔叔和我爸爸正聊得热火重天。他们边嗑瓜子，边滔滔不绝的聊着各种话题。表哥和嫂子在房间里逗小baby开心，看着小宝贝的笑脸，他们别提有多开心了。而我和俩位表姐则更是“肆无忌惮”了。我们三人盘腿坐在沙发上，悠闲自得地玩着ipad上的割绳子，时不时传出一阵阵爽朗的笑声。

又过了一会儿，奶奶慈祥地把我们带进房间，塞给我们每人一个印着“马”的红包，我们接过红包，笑盈盈的谢谢奶奶。

很快的还有5分钟就到6点了。姑父把我们安排到圆桌上的各个座位上，我和2位表姐左右邻座。先上一道饭前甜点“蔬菜沙拉”开开胃。我们三个吃货纷纷拿勺子一勺勺地舀着沙拉，没一会儿，沙拉就差不多吃完了。姑姑笑着说：“慢点吃，每人和你们抢。”这时，第二道菜“年年有鱼”上来了。色香味俱全，酱油的味道恰到好处，加上葱花点缀，这道菜别提有多美了。鱼上完了，紧接着就是“清煮虾仁”了。这道菜清甜可口，配上一碗香醋，让人垂涎欲滴。稍后又上了不少好菜，个顶个都是美食，今天来真是有口福了。

晚上，吃完晚饭。大家陆陆续续都散了，我和爸爸妈妈也只好依依不舍的和奶奶说“再见”了，今天一天玩得别提有多开心了，和家人团聚是一件幸福的事。

Dear editor,

I’m writing to tell you about the discussion we have had about whether an entrance fee should be charged for parks. 60% of us schoolmates think that an entrance fee do not meet people’s expectations, for a park is considered to be a place where the public can have a good time when they are not busy either at home or at work. If an entrance fee must be paid by the visitors for a park, it will be necessary to build a gate and surrounding walls. In the end a city will take on a bad look. 40% of us schoolmates think that an entrance fee can be accepted, but it must not be too expensive. The money from ticket selling can be used for paying the gardeners in the park and buying some other kinds of flowers and trees.

With regard to myself, I think an entrance fee is useful, for it can be used to protect a park. Do we share the same opinion, dear editor?

Yours truly,

Li Hua

Along with the time development accessing the net already turned the extremely universal matter. No matter is adult or the child so long as mentioning the computer all think of internet. But accessing the internet is advantageous but also has shortcoming.

I knew very many people access the net mainly is for playing games which is very bad for the study. Therefore some people believed the elementary and middle school students lack the self-control.

Butthere are many people approving to accessing internet why? Because internet can provide to the people very helps. First the network looks like a library we can look up very many materials easilyand it is quicker than the speed of consulting books; Next we may read a richer news on-line; In addition accessing the net also has other functions for example E-mail telephoning on the net and so on.

Actually accessing the net has its profit and the shortcoming place. We use it to open to expand the field of vision the study knowledge but must certainly grasp the discretion.随着时间的发展，接入网已经变成了极为普遍的问题。不管是大人还是孩子，只要一提电脑，都想到互联网。但是，上网是有利的，但也有缺点。

网络的好与坏高中英语作文 我知道很多人上网，主要是玩游戏，这对学习是很不好的。因此，有人认为，中小学生缺乏自我控制能力。

但是，有许多人赞成上网，为什么呢?因为互联网可以为人们提供很有帮助。首先，网络就像一个图书馆，我们可以看到很多材料很容易，而且比查阅书籍速度快;其次，我们可以读到更丰富的新闻在线;此外，上网还有其它作用，例如，电子邮件，网上通电话等等。

其实，上网有它的盈利和缺点的地方。我们用它来开阔视野，拓展视野，学习知识，但一定要把握自由裁量权。

Courage is very important. Everyone needs it. We will meet many difficulties in our life and sometimes we will fail, but we can’t lose courage. If we lose courage, we can’t do anything, because we don’t dare to do anything; we are afraid of failure. This is my Chinese teacher me in the first class. I agree with him. For example, we don’t have the courage to hands up to say our answer, how can we know we are right or wrong. I will remember his word forever,” never lose courage .”

勇气是很重要的。每个人都需要勇气。我们在生活中会遇到很多困难，有时我们会失败，但是我们不能失去勇气。如果我们失去了勇气，我们将会一事无成，因为我们什么都不敢做；我们害怕失败。这是我的语文老师在第一节课的时候说的。我同意他的说法。例如，我们没有勇气举手说出我们的答案，我们怎么能知道我们的答案是对的还是错的呢。我会永远记住他的话，“永远不要失去勇气。”

[别失去勇气高中英语作文