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nominalisation

Essay writing: style and substance

2017-01-15T10:19:18+00:00November 17th, 2015|English, writing|

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable. George Eliot As with most subjects, the step up from GCSE to A level English literature is tough. You can get a pretty good grade at GCSE without developing a critical style or understand much about the art of constructing an academic essay. Students' work is routinely littered with stock phrases such as "I know this because" and "this shows" all of which shift the focus from having to think about subject content in sophisticated ways to simply learning a collection of fail-safe formulas. Of the 4 [...]

Black space: improving writing by increasing lexical density

2013-12-10T08:40:46+00:00December 9th, 2013|writing|

Style ... is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament... ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’ On the Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch So, what is lexical density? Basically, all texts are made up of lexical words which carry meaning (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and grammatical words which act as the glue which hold the lexical words in place (Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, some adverbs, determiners, and interjections.) It is the lexical words that explain information. As a general rule texts with lots of [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 2: Model

2014-04-21T21:48:10+01:00June 30th, 2013|English, Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Over the past few years I've thought a lot about how and what we should teach. My journey has been long and painful. I used to evangelically promote the teaching of transferable '21st century skills' like creativity and problem solving. Now I reckon that actually these skills might be subject specific, and that solving a maths problem might be very different to solving a problem in English. And perhaps being creative in science may possibly be fundamentally different to creativity in history. I used to be firmly convinced that everything students needed to know could be outsourced to Google. Why bother learning [...]

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