Writing a Love Letter

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Doing the Spadework - Pre-Writing Activities and Characteristics of a Love Letter

3 Writing the First Love Letter

4 Post-Writing Activities and Evaluation

5 Conclusion

Bibliography

1 Introduction

Every once in a while people fall in love. Unfortunately, there are many cases in which they do not admit their feelings to the woman or man they lost their heart to. People often are inhibited and cautious when it comes to express affection to the woman or man of choice. Sometimes they even let their chance slip, because they are afraid of embarrassment and negative feedback from the one they adore. An adequate alternative to a face-to-face confession is the love letter. Writing a love letter is a meaningful art and it offers a great possibility to reveal one’s affection for the receiver without evoking shameful situations and awkward moments that may hurt one’s own feelings. By writing creatively, using the right selection of words and good argumentation, a love letter can be more than just a declaration oflove. They often relinquish a moment of mystery, excitement and surprise and many people keep them lifelong as their secret treasures. In fact, writing good love letters is a demanding task even for advanced students. It might take hours of practice, drafting and rewriting to create an emotional and inspirational love letter.

This paper will be about teaching intermediate students in the English foreign language (EFL) classroom, how to write a love letter. It functions as a guide for teachers to help them structuring and planning their lessons on this topic. Furthermore, it provides adequate teaching methods and innovative ideas to effectively instruct students on their way to become successful love-letter writers.

The paper will commence by introducing several pre-writing activities, which serve to prepare students before they get started with the major task. In addition, the stylistic devices and structural guidelines love-letter writing requires will be introduced. In the second step, the paper concentrates on love-letter writing itself. It explores the direct preparation necessary and offers useful hints concerning the teacher’s role in the writing phase. Finally, this paper illustrates a number of useful post-writing activities and evaluations methods in detail.

2 Doing the Spadework - Pre-Writing Activities and Characteristics of a Love Letter

Before students get involved with the actual process of writing their first love letter there are a few things to do, which help them to warm up before turning to the main task. Teachers should focus on pre-writing activities to prepare their students. First of all, it is recommended to always sequence material and tasks by difficulty level, so that students will not be overstrained at an early stage.^[1] To keep students motivated and concentrated is essential for successful process-oriented learning. Therefore, tapping the students’ interests on the topic is a great approach to increase motivation and offer them the chance to actively take part in the lesson. To reach this, brainstorming and mind-mapping are two recommended and valuable methods. They offer students a chance to deal with the topic from the very start and help them to find their individual interest in it. Brainstorming and mind-mapping activate and convey knowledge as well as useful vocabulary, which is indispensable to the topic. The teacher’s task is to give hints, inspire the students and to collect the student’s ideas for visualization on the board, so that every single student has direct access to it and can use it as a source whenever necessary. The outcome of the brainstorming should include expressions and phrases that are frequently used in love letters, forms of address, information on formal characteristics of a love letter, and useful adjectives to describe a person. Brainstorming and mind-mapping provide the possibility to explore the types of information required for love letter writing. It makes students recognize, which options they have to successfully approach the main task.^[2]

After the brainstorming is finished and the mind-map completed, the next step can be faced. It is time for the students to become familiar with the new expressions and styles they have just heard about. To reach this goal, students should actively make use of the new vocabulary and phrases. Therefore, the first pre-writing activity could be to ask the students to write half a page about someone or something they admire (for example a sports star, a musician, football, carnival) and the reasons for their affection.^[3] This task focuses on the expression of strong feelings and explanation of the reasons, why he or she adores the particular person, activity or object. In this task, it is crucial that the students choose words and phrases that apply to expressing emotions. The students are given freedom to creatively write about a topic of their choice. Through this, they can identify with their writings and as a result, motivation is increased and students are likely to put effort into it. After the task is accomplished, some students may read their texts out loud to the class, so that the other students can benefit from it. This task serves as an instrument to prepare them for the love- letter writing. Hence, clear structure and comprehensible argumentation are crucial to successfully complete the task. This pre-writing activity not only involves necessary vocabulary, phrases and style, it also helps students to lose inhibition and makes them frankly write and speak about their affection for someone or something. Furthermore, students have to give good argumentation for their feelings to persuade the reader. These abilities - writing frankly about emotions and being able to argue properly with selected words - are especially important when it comes to love-letter writing because a love letters’ primary concern is to disclose feelings and convince the reader.

As soon as the pre-writing activity is completed, the students should become acquainted with the structural and formal characteristics of a love letter. How to formally address the person (e.g. “Dear ...”, “My dear ...”, “My beloved ...” etc.), whom the letter is dedicated to and how to use a complementary close at the end of the letter (e.g. “With all the love of my heart, .”, “With fond affection .”, etc.) are the basics to writing love letters. To teach students the structural and formal basics, the teacher can simply hand out a worksheet with examples of different love letters. In the next step the teacher can discuss and elaborate together with the students, which formulations and structural qualities the different love letters all have in common. To save the outcome, the teacher may create the schematic structure of a love letter and write it on the board, so that it is visualized and remains accessible for every student.^[4] It is the teacher’s job to clarify, that clear structure and neat organization are indispensable for good quality writing.^[5]

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^[1] Richards, J.C. (2001): Curriculum development in language teaching. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 150.

^[2] Grabe, William & Robert B. Kaplan (1996): Theory & Practice ofWriting. Essex, England: Pearson Educated Limited. 271.

^[3] ibid. 334.

^[4] Burns, Ann (2001): Genre-based Approaches to Writing and Beginning Adult ESL Learners. In: Candlin, Christoper N., Neil Mercer (eds.): English Language Teaching in its Social Context. (2001) London: Routledge. 204.

^[5] Hairston, Maxine C. (1998): Successful Writing. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 10.