Learning from my mistakes: an English teacher's blog

Teaching students to write with effect is quite a tricky thing. Over the years, I have seen writing reduced to tick lists. The problem is th...

We never really talk enough about the complexity of reading and writing. And, we certainly don’t talk enough about the emotional complexity ...

  ‘When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childh...

I detest purple prose. Nothing grates when you’ve read your fifteenth example of personification by the third sentence. Especially when the ...

  We, generally, spend an inordinate amount of time writing openings to texts. We are happy to analyse openings to texts. We are happy to ge...