Change, cause & effect

The first sentence breaks the linear flow of time. The snippet is a flashback, and the first sentence is sending us back in time to talk about the accident. 

You can choose whether or not you want to do something similar in your response.

Focus on a character who is caught up in a situation external to them:

• Open with a summary statement, if you like.
• Set up the situation.
• Introduce the disruption with 'then'.
• Describe something happening simultaneously using 'as'.
• Link to a consequence with 'and'.
• Describe the consequence as explicitly or vaguely as you like.

We're going to stop highlighting snippets in this way through the rest of the lesson, and this snippet is a good example of why.

There are actually two cause and effect loops in this snippet:

• Narrator hears truck, so she looks up.
• Truck crashes into sedan, so narrator dies.

Highlighting each loop separately becomes needlessly fussy and confusing, while combining loops into bigger loops like we do here can also be confusing.

So in the next few activities we're going to focus on the connectors.