Lessons

The first of these lessons is a quick introduction for all users. The others are detailed guides for teachers.

Characters with beliefs! Places with history! Dialogue with intent! Narrative Basics lessons teach all these features and more. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

A new series of lessons about elements that take narrative writing from good to great. Coming up next: scene and summary!

Learn how to mine memories—both real and imagined—in order to write about powerful moments, stories and themes from your life. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Learn how to construct well-reasoned arguments.

Learn to influence an audience through character, emotion, & logic.

The facts, and only the facts. But well-chosen, and organised into a meaningful hierarchy or sequence. Coming up next: Layers & Lenses!

Explore how word groups and clause components work in authentic texts. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Em dashes, semi-colons, and other super-useful-once-you-know-them punctuation tools, explored in a Writelike way. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Quick intros to genre-specific patterns, from sci fi & horror to stories about everyday life.

French Revolution as tabloid journalism. Kitchen fail as art gallery label. Godzilla as haiku. Learn to recombine genre and content with Mixed Remix lessons. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Standalone lessons about the voice and style of classic authors.

Cataclysmic concepts! Heroic triumvirates! Misbehaving mobs! Developing a high-concept story using the first chapter of Michael Grant's GONE as a model. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Lyrical and timeless, Storm Boy is a classic story and a challenging text to model for writers of any age. Suitable for advanced Middle Years and up.

Dark places, a sense of decay, and isolated heroes. Create classic gothic effects using simple contemporary language with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Space! Aliens! Exotic tech! Transform everyday objects and situations into sci-fi magic with S.F. Said’s Phoenix as a model. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Master subjective narration and first person storytelling by modelling extracts from the opening chapter of Tim Winton's novel, That Eye, the Sky. Suitable for general audiences (Young Adult and up).

Shabby detectives, mysterious clients, and tropes too good to refuse! Learn to write hardboiled detective parody with Anthony Horowitz's The Falcon's Malteser. Suitable for Middle Years and up.

Quick little practice lessons. Each page is a standalone short-snippet activity.

Some quick, simple lessons that use authentic text snippets for spelling and punctuation practice.