Recount Text

What is a recount?

Often you will want to tell other people about something that has happened in your life. You might want to tell about what you did at the weekend. It might be about exciting thing that happened when you were on holidays last year. Speaking or writing about past events is called a recount.

A recount is a piece of text that retells past events, usually in the order in which they happened. The purpose of recount text is to give the audience a description of what occurred and when it occurred.

Some examples of recount text types are:

• Newspaper reports
• Conversations
• Speeches
• Television interviews
• Eyewitness account
• Letters

Features of a recount

Constructing a written recount

The steps for constructing a written recount are:

• a first paragraph that gives background information about who, what, where, and when (called an orientation)
• a series of paragraphs that retell the events in the order which they happened
• a concluding paragraph (not always necessary.

Language features in a recount

The language features usually found in a recount are:

• proper nouns to identify those involved in the event
• descriptive words to give details about who, what, when, where and how
• the use of the past tense to retell the events
• words that show the order of events (for example, first, next, then).

Models of recounts

As it happened

One very spooky encounter with a UFO (an unidentified flying object) occurred in May 1974 involving a couple driving from Zimbabwe to South Africa.

As they carefully throughout the night they saw a flashing blue-white light that was going on and off in a slow, steady rhythm. Shortly after noticing this, the car was covered in a bright circle of light.

Inside the car it suddenly became very cold. The couple wrapped themselves in thick blankets and turned on the heater but they still shivered.

Then their car began to act very strangely. Suddenly the headlight went off, the brakes failed, the steering wheel locked and the fuel gauge showed empty. Next the car began speeding up and raced along the road at 190 kilometres an hour. To one side of the car, the UFO continued to follow.

The driver and his passenger lost consciousness. When they awoke they were near the small town of Fort Victoria. The car’s odometer showed that only 12 kilometres had been travelled, yet the distance from where they first saw the UFO to Fort Victoria was 290 kilometres.

Although the couple’s description of what happened contained plenty of details, many people find it hard to believe that UFOs do exist.

Source: Anderson, Mark and Kathy Anderson. 2003. Text Types in English 1. South Yarra: Macmillan Education Australia Pty Ltd.