Writing lesson

You start with a hook, I explain to the kids while teaching them English class, to draw the reader in. Try to make it interesting, something that makes them want to read on. For example, you could say:

A woman once gave birth to a baby in a tree above the worst floodwaters ever recorded in Mozambique. The rains came as a deluge and the river burst its banks in a great surge. The tree almost couldn't hold all the people who ran to it for safety, fifteen in all. But help did not come soon. They had no choice but to perch there, with nothing to eat or drink, and wait as the days passed. The woman was nine months pregnant and carrying her two youngest children on her back in a cloth - in a tree, waiting.

Once you've captured their interest, you have to deliver, I continue. Your teachers told you that a paragraph needs to be 3 or 4 sentences, and that's not bad starting advice. But what's more important is that you have something substantive to say. You are building a wall now, and you need to pack it with facts and details. But don't get too wordy; that makes for an ugly wall.

When the labor pains started, things progressed quickly. Her husband's mother was with her in the tree, and she grasped a cloth tightly - maybe it was her own skirt, maybe it was what had been holding the other children - between the laboring woman's legs to catch the slippery babe when it shot out. It worked. The baby did not slip into the floodwaters.

You get to decide how tall or thick you want this wall to be. Bigger isn't always better, I confide to the kids, but there's no one right way. Experimenting is the fun part. You can ask yourself, what kind of wall is this, exactly? What is its purpose? You yourself may not even know!

It was a girl. Peering into the thin wet cloth, the woman could see that much. Or perhaps by then, she had collapsed back into the knotty embrace where the limb met the trunk, overcome; and it was another fugitive who clambered over to announce it to the others. A baby girl who was born alive in a tree above a still-churning flood. They had now been waiting for four days.

I point out to Thea and Lev: Climax is what we call the part of a story that makes you hold your breath. (It's when you snuggle up to us on the couch during movies.) It's the part where we find out: Will things work out? How will they work out?

The rhythmic pulse of the helicopter was slow to reach their ears, probably, against the sound of the angry water below. But once it appeared, its noise drown out the cries of the new baby and even the adults' hysterical relief. Soon a man was lowered down to them on a rope, and the first person he brought up to safety was the woman holding the baby. The little girl was raised up into the air by a thick metal cord, even while she still dangled heavy from a thin umbilical cord attached to her mother's placenta. Born and rescued, within minutes.

The conclusion should be congruous with the start, I sigh, and this is not always easy. Congruous is when things are of the same substance. If your wall is brick, now is not the time to throw in stone. That said, it's good both to satisfy and stir your readers. As you wrap things up, you may leave them with a surprised catch in their throat, from something unexpected that leaves them thinking afterward.

Everyone was eager to meet this girl baby, who had been born in a tree above great floodwaters. Mozambique's own president hailed her as remarkable and, with celebrated magnamity, declared that her education would be free for life! Her path had been predestined for survival and - if not for greatness - at least now for tranquility. She had more than earned it. On that, the world easily agreed.

And that is how to write a good essay, I conclude, satisfied; as the kids nod quietly and turn to their blank notebooks to begin.

https://bbc.com/news/articles/c79re5415n2o