Gloom. Despair. Grief. Fear.
There was a violent earthquake. Angels. Soldiers who fainted.
Then—joy! Amazement! Rejoicing!
This week is Holy Week for Christians. We remember and celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry, Last Supper, trial, death, and resurrection.
The historical accounts of the resurrection in the Bible mention
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This week is Holy Week for Christians. We remember and celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry, Last Supper, trial, death, and resurrection.
All the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) have accounts of the resurrection, but none of the accounts are written in first person.
First-person point of view is when the narrator is telling the story, like this: “I saw the angels,” “I walked up to the tomb,” or “When we saw that it was empty, he went in and I backed away.”
The disciple John, when mentioning himself, writes of himself in third person as “the other disciple,” like this: “So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first” (John 20: 3-4). What would his story be like if he had written it in first person?
Many people are mentioned in the accounts of the resurrection: Mary Magdalene and other women, guards, angels, disciples such as Peter and John, chief priests, Cleopas and the other man walking to Emmaus, and Doubting Thomas. What story could they tell?
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I love to bring you examples of effective writing so your students can use them, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of the U. S. Congress is an excellent example of persuasive writing. He used many powerful strategies in his speech, five of which we’ll delve into today.
Your students will better understand the intricacies of writing when they have the chance to learn from professional examples of published authors and speechmakers, so, to that end, let’s explore the persuasion tactics Netanyahu used.
Below are five powerful persuasion techniques. After the list, you’ll find a family writing prompt that involves one of them.
To read the complete transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, click here. .
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You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.
But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?
Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description:
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In 1961, famous American poet Robert Frost did something no other poet had ever done.
He read one of his poems for a presidential inauguration. John F. Kennedy personally asked Frost to read a poem for the inauguration, and Frost recited his famous poem “The Gift Outright.”
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Are you wearing green?
Saint Patrick, whom we celebrate March 17, is famous for teaching the ancient Irish about Christianity in the fifth century.
Legend has it that in order to teach people about the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), Patrick used a three-leaf shamrock to show how each leaf is separate but also part of the same plant.
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Everyone has stuff they don’t like doing or stuff that creeps them out.
That’s true for Howie Mandel, comedian and former host of the TV show Deal or No Deal. He hates shaking hands with people because of all the germs he can get from one handshake. Now he uses a fist bump.
“I do it because it just uses the outside of my hand. I can do it and still hold a sandwich. But when I get home,
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Some people believe they’re boring. They have no story to tell. They’ve done nothing interesting.
But a wise man named Ryter thinks they’re wrong.
In Rodman Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, old man Ryter is talking to the young teen Spaz, the main character. Here’s what Ryter says to him:
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Japanese scientists are hot on the trail of the extinct wooly mammoth’s DNA, which is available from tissue preserved in Russia. What do they want to do with the DNA?
They want to clone it and, in about five years, make a modern mammoth.
Ryan Phelan of Revive & Restore would like to bring back
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I’ve had a long and strange relationship with the classics.
In 8th grade, our English class read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but I could never figure out what the red “A” stood for.
As an Christian adult, I developed the inexplicable idea that reading fiction was a waste of time. I should read only religious or self-help books . . . until I became so ill that I was bored out of my skull for one month lying on the couch. Then I turned to the only fiction book in our tiny trailer: a complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, which seemed appropriate for someone with the last name of Watson.
I was hooked, and I never looked back.
(Well, there was that one time when I resisted reading George Eliot’s Silas Marner because I mistook “Marner” for “Mariner,” and I have a dislike for sea-going stories but then read it and it became one of my FAVORITES! But that is another story.)
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