The opening of The Tell-Tale Heart

Lesson overview

Detailed practice
Story - Narrative
Young adult and up
The Tell Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe
exclamations
fragments
repetition
literary devices
openings
voice
first person point of view
language techniques
intensity
showing character emotion
word choice
characterisation
emphasis
playing with sentence structure
tense
contrast
sentence types
questions
first person pov
In this lesson we rewrite the opening paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, with a focus on a manic narrator denying a crime so strongly they convince us they are guilty. Because of this passage uses so many different language techniques, we break it into tiny details before building back up to a whole. This lesson is suitable for advanced students, or intermediate students with teacher support.
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