Engaging your

audience: Tension
and suspense
 Narrative feature
Narrative must be built around an event or series of events,
but it is made distinctive by including other elements:
• Reflections (thoughts and attitudes)
• Emotions (feelings and memories)
• Descriptions (of people and places)
Narrative is usually written in the past tense, the natural
mode for relating something which has already happened,
and candidates who begin writing in the present tense usually
forget and switch to the past tense after a few paragraphs.
 Engaging reader
•In order to engage the reader, you must not only
tell an interesting story, but also give it a setting
and an atmosphere.
•The reader needs a sense of time, place and
weather to be able to relate to the scene, and
enough descriptive detail to visualize the
characters.

•Vocabulary choice!!
3 different kinds of narrative

•Science fiction
•Comedy
•Detective
Read the extract from a short story set in South Africa, in which an
elderly man is trying to escape from a gang of youths who intend to
steal his money.
 Task #1
•Select from the above extract all the words and short
phrases which convey a feeling of danger or pain.

•Example;
- Trapped
- Heavy stick
-…
 Task #2
•Write comments to explain the meanings and
connotations of these words.

•For example,
•barbed means pointed and sharp, and its collocation
with the word wire makes us think of places that
people are forbidden to enter or leave.
Compare 2 extracts

•Page 96
•Page 97
Write what features the two previous extracts have in
common, and how they differ.
Consider the following.
• Narrator
• Atmosphere
• Setting
• Sense of a presence
• References to noise or silence.
• Use of paragraphing
• Use of adjectives and adverbs
• Choices of verbs
• Sentence structure
• Pace (speed of events)