Lesson overview

Detailed practice
Story - Narrative
Young adult and up
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
social observation
narrative distance
detachment
symmetry
evaluation
judging
voice
style
tense
word choice
third person omniscient point of view
summary description
project
drafting
editing
characterisation
precision
vagueness
contrast
pivots
expansion
ornate sentence structure
ornate vocabulary
oblique language
expressing emotion
passive voice
nominalisation
continuous tense
juxtaposition
omniscient pov
In this lesson we rewrite a paragraph from early in Pride and Prejudice, in which Austen contrasts the impressions made by different men at the same ball. We approach our variation in two drafts: the first draft focuses on structure (exploring Austen's use of symmetry and evaluation) and the second focuses on voice (experimenting with examples of tense, phrasing, and word choice that help create Austen's detached and ironic style). We also use this snippet as a keyhole view into Austen's world as a whole.