Cambridge B1 Preliminary (PET): How to Write a Story

here we go once again for more b1 preliminary writing today we will check out story writing and go into a lot of detail so make sure you keep watching until the end hi and welcome to teacher film where i help people like you pass their cambridge exam before we get started make sure you hit that like button and you can check out the full article to this video following the link in the description box below so with all that out of the way let's get into it to begin the video let's start with some more general information about story writing in b1 preliminary first of all a story is not a mandatory task in b1 preliminary you have the choice between a story or an article the only mandatory task is an email also as with the other types of texts in the exam you should write around a hundred words my recommendation is more like between 100 and 120 just to be on the safe side okay so now that we've talked a bit about the general things let's go into a little bit more detail when we look at a story writing task there's not that much information that becomes available to us you always get a sentence that you have to use to start your story here in this example the sentence that your story must begin with is as the plane flew lower lou saw the golden beaches of the island below apart from that first sentence there are a few more things that you need to keep in mind namely the right structure for your story as well as using good language this includes the correct verb forms time expressions as well as interesting language like adjectives and adverbs but let's not go too fast first we should look at how we can analyze a task and get as much information as possible the first step to a successful story is always a good task analysis with a task analysis we can get information from the task that can help us write our story and it can also help us structure our ideas so overall the task analysis helps us write more efficiently and more effectively here is our example task from earlier again once again there only seems to be one sentence and what can we get from this one sentence but not so fast looking at it carefully can help us get all the information we need to do a task analysis the right way we can always ask a few specific questions first of all what is the topic of the story knowing the topic can help you with some ideas and it can also help you find the right vocabulary for your story in our example task the topic is something like a holiday as lou is flying to an island we also know that lou seems to be the main character of the story all of these little pieces of information can already help you brainstorm some ideas for your story the second question you should ask yourself in your task analysis is what exactly do i have to include in my text we can usually find a few little bits of information that make it easier for us to address the task in the right way when we write a story and as you can see in our example task the way the story continues after the first sentence is very open and you can decide on the different events the beginning main part and ending of the story as well as the atmosphere or mood the only restriction is really that first sentence that can be very exciting and if you feel that you are a very creative person that's amazing for you for some other students this might be a little bit more difficult and they prefer a task that is a little bit more structured like an article writing task the last question we should always ask ourselves is who is going to read the story the good thing is that a story is a fictional piece of writing so that means you can decide how formal or informal your writing should be for a story however i recommend using a more informal style of language so you can see good task analysis can help us extract quite a lot of information even though there's only one sentence to help us in a story writing task the next step once you finish your analysis is to think about the right structure for your story the good thing about story writing in b1 preliminary is that you can always use the same paragraphs or the same structure we always start with the first sentence from the task plus a little bit of additional information to form the beginning of the story following that we need to come up with the main events and we can use one or two bigger paragraphs to tell what happens in the story and last but not least every good story has an ending so after the main events we need to bring our story to some kind of conclusion so once again every good story has a beginning a main part and an ending always keep those three parts in mind and you will be fine okay so now let's have a look at these different parts in a little bit more detail first of all we start with our first sentence or beginning of the story i would say it is enough if you add one more sentence to the sentence that you get from the task to form your beginning remember that you only need to write between 100 and 120 words so i wouldn't use too much of my space for the beginning of the story after all your main part should be the longest part with that being said your beginning is there to create a good atmosphere and a little bit of interest in the reader from the beginning and let's have a look at an example to see how you can do that here you can see what i did to write a beginning for the task that we've looked at earlier i started the story with the sentence from the task as you always should and i've added simply one more sentence and that's all with two sentences i've already written a nice beginning to the story at the beginning it is always a good idea to use the past continuous as it is a useful verb form to show what was happening in the background and it's good to set the scene of your story i've also added some interesting language in this case you can see that i've used some adjectives and adverbs to make everything a little bit more interesting and last but not least i've also introduced some direct speech you can see direct speech by looking at the little quotation marks at the beginning and the end of that sentence and it makes it easier for the reader to connect to the story because the characters are actually talking direct speech is a very nice feature that i definitely recommend using in your story next we are going to focus on the main part of the story as the name says it is the most important part of your story and here is where all the main events happen so here it is really important that the events that you write about are in a logical order and that the language you use is interesting and obviously correct so once again let's have a look at a couple of example paragraphs that i've written for this specific task so you can see that i'm developing the story and i'm describing the main events rather than the main events however i would like you to focus on some of the language that i've used here first of all at the beginning of my second main paragraph you can see the word however which demonstrates or expresses contrast so that means that something surprising is going to happen in the second paragraph and this little word already gives a signal to the reader that they can expect something different as you can also see i've decided to add another sentence in direct speech because again it makes it easier for the reader to connect to the characters another very important feature in a story are time expressions because they help the reader to put all the events and all the actions in a logical order and the reader can understand when each event happened also always make sure to use the correct past verb forms why while we normally use the past simple to describe all the main events we might want to talk about things that happened before the main events or that were happening at the same time in this case we can use the past perfect for example had seen or again the past continues and this example was changing and was raining and then last but not least in each of the paragraphs you can see again that i've tried to add a few nice adjectives or adverbs just to make everything a little bit more interesting and colorful of course my example paragraphs are very very good examples and i've spent quite some time on designing them for you don't worry if you don't include all these different things in your story but always make sure that you at least try to include some of them the examiners really like to see this kind of language and the more you can put in there the better but please don't get too stressed about it last but not least every story needs to get an ending a story without an ending isn't really a story how would you feel if you went to the cinema and the film just ends right in the middle you would be really disappointed and it doesn't matter if it's a happy ending or a sad ending but make sure that your story ends in some way of course you can give your story a surprising ending or something funny but again don't feel too much pressure to do anything spectacular here just make sure that the story ends so here you can see my example ending and as you can see it's really short because once again the focus is always on the main paragraphs your ending just rounds off the story i've decided to make the ending a little bit surprising as lou meets the woman from the plane again as i've said earlier your ending doesn't have to be anything spectacular in my example i didn't do anything crazy and also yeah make sure that you don't introduce any new characters or any new things that the reader doesn't have any idea about just make sure that your story ends and the reader is satisfied so there you are i hope you found the example useful always remember when you write a story that you structure your story well with a beginning main part and ending and also try to include some interesting language like adjectives and adverbs direct speech contrast and other things that make it more interesting for the reader so all you need to do now is take my advice and put it into practice try to include a little bit of good language here and there and see how it can improve your stories immediately as always thank you for watching my video you can get more information by checking out the full article you can find it by following the link in the description box below and there are also a few other links that you can follow to get more information about teacher phil and my services so with all of that being said all the best and i'll see you next time

Channel: Teacher Phill

Views: 2,603

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Id: G5cyIsCApJo

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021