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Try to write a description of all these things. Don't forget
that people talk to each other. Give them things to say.
B. Take an incident from a book you have read. Rewrite it by
changing the names of the people and the place where the story
takes place. If you try this exercise several times you will
find that you can make more and more changes until you have a
story which is more and more your own.
Practice writing stories as often as you can. There is not much
point criticising other people's writing if you haven't tried
yourself.
Easy to Read and Difficult to Read
I hope you understand now that when a book is easy to
read or difficult to read it is partly the reader and partly
the book which causes the difficulty. There is no such thing
as a book for everyone. When Albert Einstein published his Theory
of Relativity there may have been no more than a dozen people
in the whole world who could understand it; perhaps not even
that many. Even now most people cannot understand it. But for
those who could understand it, it was the most interesting book
they had ever read. They had had the right kind of experiences
to enable them to understand what Einstein had seen. Nowadays
the right kind of experience is an intensive study of theoretical
physics for many years.
The simplest book is difficult for those who can't read.
Unfortunately books do not usually have a label on them telling
you what you need to know before you read them. (Some books intended
for beginners studying English as a second language are labelled
with the vocabulary used - these are the specially written Simplified
Books). The only thing you can do is to read those books which
you find interesting, leave those books which you find impossible,
and try hard with those books you find difficult but want or
need to read.
If you find all or most of the set books impossible you probably
should not be trying to study literature. If you only find them
difficult, keep trying.
Something to do
Look at your list of books read. Can you say which of them
you might want to read again, and those you don't expect to read
again?
Perhaps you have already read a book for the second time. Write
a review and compare it with what you wrote before (if you wrote
one the first time). Did you see more in the book more the second
time? Or less?
In the study of literature we looking for the kind in which we
see more the second time (and later times).
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Scrap Book
Sometimes you may find in a book a paragraph or sentence
which uses language so well that you want to remember it. Why
not keep an exercise book for passages you particularly like.
You can call it a Scrap Book. Most writers keep notebooks for
such things. But be careful if you use quotations in your own
work. Never pretend someone else's work is your own. That is
Plagiarism and you can find yourself in a court case over it.
The way to avoid being accused of plagiarism is to put the author's
name after the quotation.
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