The Alchemists Letter Thursday 4 th March 2021

The Alchemist’s Letter Thursday 4 th March 2021 Using persuasive language.

Inside this envelope is a letter written to you from me, explaining why school is important. You each have an individual letter, personally written. What do you think could be written inside? Make some notes. Let’s create a mind map of the points you have come up with. What does it mean to persuade? How many of the points are persuasive? How and why have I tried to persuade you?

Groups of three When three adjectives or phrases are used together to make them stand out. e. g. Homework is boring, dull and uninteresting.

Repetition Words or phrases are repeated so that they stick in the reader’s mind. e. g. remember what is was like to be at school; remember how much work you had.

Emotive Language When words are used to make the reader feel a certain emotion, like sadness or anger. e. g. We are the poor, helpless children who are forced to do hours and hours of homework every night.

Exaggeration When information is given that is over the top, or slightly untrue. e. g. If I get one more piece of homework, I am going to move to the moon!

Rhetorical questions Using questions that don’t need an answer to get the audience to think. e. g. Could you live with yourself if you missed out on this opportunity?

In The Alchemist’s Letter, Nicholas narrates the personal letter he wrote to his son to try and make him understand why things ended the way it did, and to try and stop Verideon from making the same mistakes. How is persuasive language used in the narration?

Writing task. Today’s task will be to write Verideon’s response to his father’s letter. You will need to make some reference to the events you saw in the memories. I expect to see some persuasive language used to show the broken relationship between the characters. Let’s look at a WAGOLL example.

Final finish Write down three things you have learnt about persuasive devices.