Let's Find Out About Language by Exploring it

 It's my strong belief that primary school children can find out a lot about language (knowledge about language (KAL)) by exploring it and playing with it.  I believe that the kind of knowledge expressed by the grammar for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 is of limited use, partly because it is too much too early, but also because a lot of it is inaccurate and that its starting point - the sentences made up in text books and the SATs tests is not 'language'. We should also remember that the grammar test paper (in effect, the syllabus) was never explained or justified by those who imposed it. It was explicitly brought in in order to assess teachers - see the Bew Report of 2011.  This means that  when someone like me argues with it, we are arguing about what it is, not with how it was justified. 

There are many kinds of KAL and one of the 'fast ones'  pulled by the people who devised the GPS is that the 'grammar' they've introduced is some kind of 'basic' or 'nuts  and bolts' of writing or some such.  I contest that very strongly for several reasons:

1. Language is social. It has evolved as our main way of being social. We talk to each other, we write to and for each other. This 'grammar' excludes this.  It shaves off all the social aspects of language, claiming to explain 'how  language works' through a set of rules, terms and functions. In order to claim this, they have to exclude one of the greatest grammarians of the 20th century, Michael Halliday who incorporated the 'social' aspect of language in his grammar. He only looked at 'language in use', he thought of our production of language as 'choices' we make and he worked out a system of including the contexts in which we use language such as:

 who is speaking/writing? 

who is listening/reading?

 what is the theme of the 'text' we are talking about?

 and what type of 'text' is it - ie what 'genre' does it belong to? (or of course it might be a mix of type or genres.

These contexts are really fruitful ways for us to think about how we can help children talk and write, yet the 'grammar' on offer is stuck on 'the sentence'. It can only ever claim to tell us how a very limited range of sentences - those you find in a piece of very ordinary and conventional prose - work. Every day and all day, we use language in ways that this 'grammar' hardly touches: the grammars of how we put conversations together ('pragmatics), of how we shape and structure stories (stylistics and structuralism), of the forms and purposes of non-fiction, of TV interviews, of popular song, of radio DJs, of comedy, of plays, of film scripts and so on.  These are some of the contexts that Halliday was talking about. By talking about the 'participants' in conversations and writing, he drew attention to 'register' (why do we pitch the way we write in particular ways?) and some of this is what we now talk about in terms of 'writing "up"' or 'writing "down"' which we do in real life but also characters do it in fiction. It doesn't take us long to find the hierarchies of society (race, class, gender, where we are in the 'body' hierarchies etc) permeating through our uses of language in speech and writing.

What follows are ways in which we can explore and play with 'language-in-use' - real language being produced and received in real life situations. 

Collecting language

This works to the same principle that we might apply to, say, biology: that we can collect specimens in order to study them, or history: that we can go to a castle to study how the Normans conquered England and Wales, or we can go and look at a  valley in order to study how rivers cause erosion. 

We can collect language in order to study it. 

One way we can do that is to create a Word Wall. 

What we can do is together collect any lines from songs or poems or plays or TV, any interesting or odd signs, shop names, things that friends and relations say, any great lines from books we like. 

As adults, we can model this to show the children what they can find and where they can go to find it. We try to alert the children to eg the jokey names that hairdressers come up with for their salons, lovely lines from songs they like, great things from books or poems they like.

This can then act as a springboard for helping children keep language notebooks themselves. The simplest and easiest way to do this is to encourage children to think of it as an anthology where they can copy out their favourite lines from songs, poems and stories. As adults we can alert them to funny shop names or signs, or interesting things that we hear on TV or that people in our family say. Many of our children speak languages other than English. Encourage them to use their notebooks to write 'glossaries' or word-lists translating words from one language to the other. (As a child, I did this with the Yiddish that my parents scattered through their speech. 'Pulka - chicken leg' etc) 

Newspaper headlines, book titles, film titles, ads catchphrases and slogans are interesting too because they represent a form of language that we hardly ever find anywhere else. (How interesting that 'grammar' doesn't touch on this! In 'grammar' books, you sometimes see it parked as 'block language' (eg the Penguin Dictionary of Grammar), and yet it's a major form of communication. And it's not as if it's a minor byway of language-use that is peripheral to the economy. Why should it be of such low status to grammarians? (I can suggest one major reason: it's because it's a use of language where the 'sentence' is not the dominant form. Most headlines, ads' posters and slogans in general communicate without using the so-called 'rules' of the sentence. Everything that is laid down about how we must write or talk in sentences is overthrown by two minutes looking at headlines, ads and slogans.) Just take one very simple example: 'No smoking'. What is the 'grammar' of this? 'Smoking' is a past participle being used as a noun. 'No' in this context is some kind of 'determiner', as with eg 'some' or 'both' or 'my'. Or is it? In fact, because of social use of language, this use of 'no' is in fact a command or order. People in charge use it orally. So what is 'no'? In fact, it doesn't matter really what to call it because even if we do, it doesn't tell us what the phrase 'no smoking' is doing or why. The really interesting thing is that it's not a description and yet it could work that way too. 'What's going on here? There's no smoking.' The embedding of the command in the phrase that we see hundreds of times every day, comes from context. The grammar is the context, the context is the grammar. 

Song lyrics, poetry, plays, TV scripts and film scripts are other areas where the so-called  'rules' of sentences don't rule! Again, why should these be ignored? Are they not significant in the general matter of language use? Absolutely not. In fact, all this belongs to an area hardly reached by 'grammarians' - the many genres (and mixed genres and experimental genres) of written language. 

Older children/school students are using writing in ways that the 'rules' can't reach: texting and social media. In these spheres, we the users have been making up our own rules! Abbreviations, quick ways of communicating, in-jokes, much more flexibility about spelling and punctuation. There is in effect a new social language of electronic writing. It is a hugely popular, powerful form of language use. Should it be ignored  or parked in some branch line as 'wrong'? I don't think so. Let's bring it in, compare it, describe it, discuss what it is for, how the social needs are determining the 'grammar' as with 'no smoking'. 

So if we go out and collect language, we can look at these things. The moment we make comparisons, we start to see that language in use is not some inflexible set of 'rules' but is full of variation, experiment and change. Language can be enjoyed! 

Once you and a group of children have a body of collected examples (your 'specimens' if you like), they can be a point of interesting talk and cues for writing. Nearly all the writers I know do precisely this. We jot down words, phrases and notes of language-use to help us write. Of course, writers are not consulted when it comes to devising curricula for...er...writing! Writing in education is devised by people who hardly write anything but reports that hardly anyone reads but end up being the commands and diktats that people 'beneath' them have to obey. Hardly anyone has read the whole of the Bew Report and yet it is this document that has had the effect of skewing how children write in primary schools. It is one of the great paradoxes, ironies and absurdities of the politics of language in English education today! 

If people want to send me examples of how they and some children have 'collected' language, talked about it and used it in any way as a cue for writing, do get in touch. I'm on twitter and facebook and my email is on my website. 

In my next post, I'll look at another way in which we can 'explore language'. 

Grammar - there are other ways. Really!

We all of us know, one way or another, that language is social. We talk to other people, other people talk to us. We write to other people, other people write to us. Even when we say that we are writing for ourselves or even talking to ourselves we are using this system - language - which is created socially. And even more: when we think, it's made up of language (along with sensations) which again is all socially acquired and created. Everything I've written so far in this paragraph is 'social' in the sense that it belongs in the socially created and acquired 'bank of words and phrases taken from English.

'Grammar' is a means of describing the language according to what grammarians believe are its parts, functions and systems. They order languages into groups, categories and classifications. Most of the grammar that the government demands should be taught in primary schools in England leaves out the 'social' aspect of language. The terms and classifications are 'absolutes'. They are deemed to be outside of, or beyond the messy business of why someone is writing (not usually speaking!), what theme they're writing about, or what form or genre the writing is in.  So the tests and text books and examples given are time and time again, made-up sentences, phrases and clauses that demonstrate a given term or function. Why is this? What's the matter with real language used for a specific function, a specific genre, between a given write and their the audience? It's not as if we are short of examples!

This tells us a lot. It tells us that the 'grammar' that they are using is what's known as 'ideal'. It's based on what is some kind of pure language or what should 'ideally' happen. In fact, there's almost a rule that is an anti-rule: invent a rule about language and you'll find exceptions to it; invent a definition for a term or category or function and you'll find that the definition will have the problem that it overlaps with other terms, categories and functions or that it is not a necessary or sufficient definition. If you say, for example, that an adverb tells us about eg 'time, place and manner',  you can find other parts of speech (classes of word) that can do this too. If you say, for example, that there is a present tense in English, you can quickly find that that exact 'verb form' works in some contexts which are 'in the past' or 'in the future'. So it's not always a 'present tense'.  And so on.

The reason why this kind of 'grammar' is stuck in this bog of vagueness, imprecision and contradiction is that its sole means of proving that it's right, is itself. A grammarian describes a system - the 'grammar' - and tries to fit all the uses of language that they collect, into that system. The system itself is derived from a mix of the rag-bag of what grammarians have been saying for the last 3000 years (!) and new observations: virtually all of them ignoring the simple fact that language is really always 'language-in-use' in social situations and socially created forms. These 'grammars' keep referring to themselves in order to prove that they are 'right'. So there is an argument about whether there is or is not a 'subjunctive' in English. The present primary school grammar says there is. Real grammarians are not so sure. The reason why they're not so sure is because those grammarians have a system that says what verb forms are: they say they 'conjugate'. They look at, say, the thing they call the 'subjunctive' in French and see that the so-called English subjunctive is just a highly particular, fairly unusual, mostly fairly archaic sounding thing. So they say, well, it may be a thing but it's not really a 'subjunctive'. Perhaps call it something else but don't dignify it with that term. Even so, as you can see, these are arguments from inside the hut of language about language about language, according to the systems these grammarians have invented. 

One grammarian tried to step outside of the hut: M.A.K. Halliday. His first fundamental principle was that language-in-use involves 'choice'. We speak and write according to choices made according to contexts. He dubbed three of these contexts: field, mode and tenor. I'm not going to go into all this here and now, but just to say that these contexts take into account such things as: a) who is speaking/writing; who that person is speaking/writing to b) what is the theme and purpose of what is being said or written and c) what is the form or genre of what is being said or written.

These three contexts open up for us a completely different view of how language works. Instead of seeing language as a stack of inconsistent rules and terms that supposedly tell us how to write, we can see language as something we use for reasons and purposes. Accordingly, we make choices to fit the contexts.

So far, so abstract. It's quite possible to take Halliday's 'grammar' and break it down into exciting ways to teach. We can for example look at books, conversations, TV programmes, songs - anything - and talk about 'who they're for', 'what is the theme?', 'what kind of piece of language do they belong with?' We can then have a go at doing them ourselves. We can have a go at doing them but playing about with them, mixing them up, trying out new things by changing eg settings, mixing genres, changing their purpose (intended audience) etc.

This will take us into the important area of 'register' - the kinds of language that appear to follow status, class and perhaps region or locality mixed in there too. This may take us into questions of dialect and 'code-switching'. It may well lead us into making our own classifications of language that don't fit what grammarians say they should fit.

Halliday is not an easy read. Things get very complicated very quickly when you read his stuff because (I think) he was trying to prove the validity of a method which completely overturns the principles of the kinds of grammar that is the government told us had to be taught in primary schools. However, it is possible to break it down into user-friendly chunks - which he himself did! He and Peter Doughty worked with teachers and teacher-trainers (including my father) in the late 60s and produced a wonderful blue print for school work on language called 'Language in use', published by the Schools Council. 

It reminds us that there is a whole body of theory and practice that doesn't accept that the best way to teach language and writing is to use a heap of terms that at very best describe bits of 'ideal' sentences but are mostly an unreliable, inconsistent jumble of stuff acquired over hundreds of years derived from itself with no reference to the world that is using the language. 

There is also the wonderful world of 'stylistics' that addresses at a very significant level our reasons for writing in certain ways. There's 'pragmatics' that looks at how we converse. There is 'structuralism' that looks at eg story grammar (ie how we construct stories), 'narratology' (how we narrate stories, create time-frames etc), 'intertextuality' that looks at how one 'text' (story, non-fiction, song, film or whatever) 'borrows' from other texts through motif, allusion, form, story-line, language etc, and so on. If, as the government claims, they are interested in how children learn to write, then all these areas are much more fruitful to explore than that antiquated muddled grammar stuff. And it's easy to adapt them for use with young children. 

I explore these in my booklets: 

'Why Write? Why Read?'

'Writing for Pleasure'

'Reading for Pleasure'

'Poetry and Stories for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools'

all available through my website www.michaelrosen.co.uk 

click on 'Books'. 

They're for you to use, adapt and change in whatever ways work for you. 

Grammar isn't rocket science. In fact it isn't any kind of science

One of my points about 'grammar' as taught in primary schools is that it isn't a science with worldwide agreement on how to describe matter, life, nature , the universe etc. It's a field in which 'grammarians' dispute methods of describing languages. Their field is largely determined by the fact that the method they use is the language itself. It's a terminology that only uses what the grammarians perceive to be the structure of sentences. But this field is pre-decided by them. They claim that the parts and structures they describe exist but they only exist because they say they do. They have no other point of reference other than the language that they themselves have already described. This is self-referentialism gone crazy.


What gets called 'grammar' is  a schema, an attempt to find 'rules' or 'principles' in a language. The problem with it is that it's based entirely on a construct of language ripped from context and use. What would a 'grammar' of other human behaviours look like? Would they make sense ripped from context?  The 'evidence' for grammar is the grammar that the grammarian invents. It has no other point of reference. That's why it can't give us reasons for variation or change.

In fact, language is determined by a lot of other things other than itself. and even more things other than the sentence that the grammarian is looking at! This we can bundle together as 'context' ie the context of who is speaking/writing, who is listening/reading, who or what is the 'genre' of the utterance, and what else in the 'text' surrounds this sentence and why. These all affect how and why we choose what to say/write.

You'll see that this is a wider field of reference than sentence 'grammar' which claims to describe the 'rules' that determine what we say/write. So the long and short of it is that grammarians are locked in endless disputes over what is or is not x or y because they have no other point of reference other than that sentence itself. It really is a case of 'you can skin a rabbit in many ways'. Take one example. We say 'before breakfast' and 'before we had breakfast'. Some grammarians say that 'before' in these two examples are 'different parts of speech'. Other grammarians say that they're not! The point is that there is no means to 'prove' this. It's not that one is more right than the other. They are just alternative ways of describing things, using language itself as the sole field of reference.

This takes me to the farce of the 'fronted adverbial' - which by the way doesn't have to be 'adverbial' (!!!) I jest not. The laughable thing about this concept is that if you put 'fronted adverbial' into the search engines of the online Cambridge or Oxford Grammars - both highly regarded as the source of knowledge on these matters - you won't find 'fronted adverbial' as such. The Cambridge Grammar will respond like this:


"We cannot find any entries matching 'fronted adverbial'.
Please check you have typed the word correctly."


Neither of them recognise it as a term in itself. A classic case of grammarians not speaking the same language.

What does education produce?

I've always thought that education in a crude materialist sense produces products. These are not (crudely speaking) the people who come out of education at the end but their 'labour power'. That's to say their ability to sell what their minds and bodies can do in the 'labour market'. Education helps form that 'commodity' which we sell to whoever can or wants to buy it. Of course, nurture helps produce that labour power too through food, love, shelter etc but the home is not strictly speaking a place that produces for profit...though some small businesses eg family shops, hardly make a division between bringing up children and 'employing' them in the family shop. 

Anyway, though this model of education works there are problems with it, partly because of the overlap with nurture and partly because this 'labour power' may be a commodity that is produced but it quickly becomes something else when it's used in employment or production as it has a living quality that enables us to turn materials into finished articles or processes like shoes or deliveries etc. OK, we sell the commodity of labour power so that we transform 'stuff' which then enables owners to make profits. OK.

But what if, the real product of education are 'grades' or 'marks' or 'assessments'. These are inanimate bits of stuff or data. At the end of the day, this is what all schools and colleges and universities are now reduced to producing: a set of data. Teachers are employed to produce the data. In a real sense, it doesn't actually matter to management whether there is a great mark, a medium mark or a bad mark so long as it's a mark. And the 'bell curve' can be placed over the marks to ensure that it looks OK. When or if we teachers withdraw our labour (as I am at Goldsmiths) and this involves refusal to mark students' assessments this is a crucial stopping or boycotting of the institution's 'product'.

This reminds us that in a situation where assessment is not taking place but education carries on, that education is much more than assessment! In fact, the moment there is no centralised assessment we can look upon education in different ways: pursuit of things for which there are no marks! Or shared ways of talking about 'work' or 'projects' without marking them! I'm sure you can think of others. In fact when I did three years at the National Film School as a student (1973-76) we fought very hard to NOT be marked. We said, just doing the course was good enough, surely. I think that one of the things we can say to students in our action at Goldsmiths is that you could think up what are the advantages to not being assessed, and what ways can you think of that validate your work without 'data' being stuck on it at the end? In a way, the privatisation of education (especially universities) goes hand in glove with the privatisation of knowledge that is what an exam is! The data are amassed privatised chunks of knowledge. The 'product' of education.

How the government killed and maimed us in Feb/March 2020

Feb 3 2020
Boris Johnson - speech in Greenwich


"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other."


(Translation of this by me (!):  we governments shouldn't use the powers of the state to intervene against this virus because they will prevent the market from operating freely. So the virus should be allowed to fly free round the population, so that the market can be free. Mass death would be a necessary price to pay for the market to go on doing what it does - part of which is to produce the great inequalities we know of so well. And, irony, guess who would be high risk in the face of the virus? Those who experience the rough end of inequality, the poor. Could things have been stated more clearly and more horrifically than this? 

A further angle to take on this is that what Johnson is signalling here is along these lines: other countries will intervene to try to stop the virus but we won't; this means that we will have a competitive advantage over them. 

This is a possible interpretation too.

March 3 2020 Boris Johnson - press conference
" “I was at a hospital the other night where I think a few there were actually coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands."


March 5 Boris Johnson on TV

Philip Scofield:
Is the delay [ie the attempt to delay the spread of the virus] essentially trying to spread this out so it doesn’t all happen at once and overwhelm the NHS, and that you can actually delay it into perhaps the summer when it’s a little bit quieter and the ordinary flu might have died down a wee bit, is that what you’re doing?


Boris Johnson: Well it’s a very, very important question, and that’s where a lot of the debate has been and one of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance, I think it is very important, we’ve got a fantastic NHS, we will give them all the support that they need, we will make sure that they have all preparations, all the kit that they need for us to get through it. But I think it would be better if we take all the measures that we can now to stop the peak of the disease being as difficult for the NHS as it might be, I think there are things that we may be able to do.




(Note what Johnson is doing here is first stating the Herd Immunity without vaccinations that scientists and others have told him. He does not as has been stated dismiss this totally. He modifies it - in his terms: 'I think we need to strike a balance'. He is saying that trying to engineer some Herd Immunity without vaccination is OK but the government will also take 'measures' too. It's clearly a mixed message!)


March 12 Robert Peston had his usual inside story in ‘The Spectator’ with a headline “Herd immunity’ will be vital to stopping Coronavirus’ and wrote of this desirable outcome without mentioning the inevitable huge loss of life involved nor the high chance of it being unachievable.

March 13, three government scientists sang the same tune:
i) Graham Medley told BBC Newsnight, ‘We’re going to have to generate herd immunity…the only way of developing that in the absence of a vaccine is for the majority of the population to become infected…’

ii) Sir Patrick Vallance said that morning on the Today programme, ‘Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity.’

iii) Same day, John Edmunds said, ‘The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity’.

These people were talking of engineering a situation in which mass death would take place. It's not as if science is unaware of the Black Death, Myxomatosis, Polio or Dutch Elm Disease - all with mass fatalities and maiming.

The extraordinary fact is that this idea of ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination is lousy biology. 

No one knew then how long or short nor how strong or weak the body’s immune response would be to this virus. 

No one knew how often it would mutate nor how different the mutations would be from the original virus. 

These scientists were gambling with ‘known unknowns’ some of which would result in no 'herd immunity'. 

What’s more, the limited ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination that occurs naturally usually involves the evolutionary process of ‘breeding out’ (through death, before they reproduce) of those individuals who are susceptible to the virus and the ‘breeding in’ of those who are resistant, assuming the resistance is inheritable. This takes generations to effect - if ever. The problem for this scenario is that the section of the population most affected by the virus is above ‘breeding’ age! This negates the process by which evolution favours resistant individuals.


It seems to me horrific that top scientists were able to put forward their proposals to enact mass killing without being challenged, either on ethical or biological grounds. If you want to find out why or how this government has been lax, chaotic, incompetent and cruel in its approach to Covid-19, it starts here. The consequence is that there have been tens of thousands of deaths, and there are tens of thousands of us with long term or lifetime debilitating consequences.


They must never be let off the hook.

Background to 'What shall we do with books?'

In the previous blog I talked about some things you can do with books and young readers. There's a theory (or several theories) behind what I wrote there eg 'reader-response', the 'dialogic' theory of learning, 'intertextuality', 'stylistics', 'cohesion', 'structuralism' and 'post-structuralism'. The open-ended questions and the suggestions for writing are ways of opening out those theories so that they are accessible and useful for anyone and everyone. 

The reason why I suggested 'Cinderella' at the end was because it's great for trying out some of these methods: prequels, sequels, change of setting or time or characters, interviews with characters in the story, secret strings etc. With adaptation though, you can use them on any book, poem, play or film. Some people may find that they're useful by way of 'getting into' a text before more formal direction, criticism, instruction etc - as with older school students. I'd just say to that, please remember that a 'text' does its own teaching anyway! That's to say, if someone reads or hears a text and they are interested they are already involved in interpreting it. What's more they are interpreting it with their life-experience (thus the question about whether it reminds you of anything that has happened to you) but also  with their experience of other texts (thus the question about that). We can't stop ourselves reacting to texts with this body of experiences in our minds. I've found that when we invite young people to explain why and how they've made these connections between the book and themselves, that serious engagement with the text happens. 

But what about the 'explanations', and all the references that the young people (older school students) won't get unless we tell them? 

Fair question. I'd only say that it's a matter of what order we do these things. That's to say, if we dive straight in with the explanations and references and 'correct terminology', there is always the danger that we say that these texts only really matter to us adults (teachers) , that we are the only ones who know what the text is 'really' about, and you - the young people - don't. All I am suggesting here is that perhaps there is an order or sequence we can follow, in which the open-ended questions and writing can happen before the explanations that we might want to (or have to) provide.

I have written about all these things at greater length in my booklets:

'Poetry and Stories for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools'

'Why Write? Why Read?'

'Writing for Pleasure'

'Reading for Pleasure'.

They've available through my website, www.michaelrosen.co.uk

I hope you find them useful. 

What can we do with books?

When you read a book with children, you can of course just enjoy it. You can also talk about it, listening to what children say. That's great too. 

You can talk in ways that use open-ended questions, like 'what did you feel about that?', 'what did you think about that?' 'what do you think is going to happen next?' 

You can ask if anything about that scene or the book 'reminded you' of anything that you remember happening to you?

You can ask if anything about that scene of the book 'reminded you' of anything that you've ever read anywhere else, or seen in a movie, or heard in a song?

You can gently ask why or how that reminds you. What's the link?

You can ask if they've noticed anything about 'how' the book is written? Anything at all?

One 'trigger' way to get into 'how' a book or poem or play is written is to go hunting for links, or what I call 'secret strings'. We can ask children to be 'story' or 'poem' 'detectives': find anything that links with anything else because eg something is repeated eg a phrase, a sound, a line, an image or - importantly - a feeling. Or it might be because there are opposites or contrasts - that's a link too. So long as you can explain why it's a 'string', it is a string! This way we find patterns.

Another way to look at structure is to look for 'reveal-conceal'. All stories and poems unfold. As they unfold they appear to 'reveal' but even as they 'reveal', they imply or suggest that something else might happen or is going to happen, or that there is a mystery. Writers do this in hundreds of different ways. We can hunt for these.

Writers use many ways of making us feel that 'we are there'. How? Most often by using characters' point of view of what they might see, hear, smell, taste or think. It's the 'being there' business of stories and poems. We can hunt for these too by being 'detectives'. 

Books can also (of course) be great starting points for writing.

Here are some ways:

You can just try to write something very similar but you change the 'setting' (ie where it happens)

You can try to write something very similar but you change 'when' it happens.

You can try to write something very similar but you change something to do with the characters, switch from man to woman, change the cultural or ethnic background. 

You can keep the same plot but introduce a new sub-plot.

You can write a prequel (or 'back story').

You can write a sequel. 

You can also do writing by writing from the point of view of one of the characters in a book. What does that person see or hear or think about what's going on?

You can 'interview' a character from a book. Why did you do that? What did you think when you saw that? What did you want to do then?

You can turn the book into a newspaper article. 

You can pick on a tiny moment in a book and make it into a poem or song. You can do these as 'monologues' using 'I' as the viewpoint Or 'he/she/it'. This is how musicals work.

As an experiment, take a story like 'Cinderella' and experiment with any of these. It's amazing what might come out!