You will need the formatting toolbar to complete this exercise. If it is not visible, then click on <View> on the menu bar and then <Toolbars> <Formatting>. The instructions are also displayed on page two of this exercise.

Roald Dahl

He shot down enemy planes but he crashed and lived with bad backache and other aches and pains for the rest of his life. Roald Dahl was born in Wales of Norwegian parents. Dahl wrote his children’s stories in a little wooden shed in his garden at Gypsy House in Buckinghamshire. Dahl always cared about his readers. Dahl was married to the film actress Patricia Neale and they had four daughters and a son. Roald Dahl had both sadness and ill-fortune in his life along with happiness, so it is all the more remarkable that his writing has kept children laughing for years. Quentin Blake, the illustrator, remembers how Dahl would sign books ‘…though it might take two hours, everyone had a word and a signature’ and how he would reply’…to thousands of letters with specially written poems…’. He fitted it out as a perfect den for writing in and worked with a blanket around him when it was chilly. One daughter, Olivia, died of measles when she was seven: in the 1960s children were not immunised against measles. He was posted to Washington, USA, in 1942 and met an American novelist who wanted ideas for flying stories. Despite the fantastic imagination that was to create Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG, Roald Dahl did not get on well at school: we know this from his autobiography Boy. Dahl wrote some and the novelist, C. S. Forester was so impressed that he had them published. He was a fighter pilot, even though he was so tall that he could hardly fit into the aeroplane’s cockpit. Dahl became a writer during the Second World War. When he died in 1990 he was the best known of all children’s authors.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR WORK BEFORE LEAVING THIS PAGE.

PLEASE USE THE BACK BUTTON AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE TO RETURN
TO THE MAIN SITE.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Search for a sentence that opens the text so that the reader knows very quickly what the text is about. Search for a sentence that finishes the text neatly so that the reader is satisfied that she or he has read all the information you wanted to present. Highlight these in pink

2. Select your highlighter tool and use it to highlight sentences into colours that are about one idea. Use red for his boyhood and schooling; blue for his experiences in World WarII, yellow for his writing career and green for his family details.

3. Now use the cut tool and select your opening sentence.

4. Then paste it into a separate part of your document.

5. Cut your red sentences and paste them after the opening sentence. Continue with blue sentences, green sentences and yellow sentences in that order.

6. Finish with your chosen ending sentence.

You have now organised the piece of text so that readers will get the maximum information from it. However, the text will not look paragraphed. To do this you must make each block of coloured text start on a new a line.

1. Place the cursor at the end of the last line of colour and press ‘return’.

2. Repeat these instructions with each block of colour. Your text should now contain 6 clearly marked paragraphs.

3. Now remove the highlight colours so that your text is again in plain black ink.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR WORK BEFORE LEAVING THIS PAGE.