Vocabulary support

Some snippets use distinctive vocabulary, which can be a challenge when students are trying to create a similar voice.

For example, consider this snippet from Edgar Allen Poe:

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.

The Fall of the House of Usher(1839)

This snippet relies on an elaborate vocabulary to achieve its effect, so we can provide genre-specific word prompts to help students when writing (click 'Word help' on the textbox below):

Write your variation here.

For example, the vocabulary words above were extracted from gothic novels including The Castle of Otranto and Melmoth the Wanderer.

Words that create cohesion, including conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositions, depending on the text.

Essentially we found that if we only had conjunctions only, the list often felt too narrow and not 'voice-y' enough.
We didn't want to have a category devoted to adverbs alone.
So 'connectors' gives us a more flexible pool of words that all have some sort of cohesive function.

Each student will see a different set of words, and they can refresh the selection by clicking Refresh Words.

Unlike Wrotevote and reflection prompts, vocabulary support is not something you can toggle in class or lesson settings.

We decide on a page by page basis whether or not to include vocabulary support, and we usually only do so when we are asking students to imitate the voice of a source text that uses specialised or exotic words.

For example, you'll see it in a Jane Austen lesson that includes a voice draft, but not in a Dickens lesson that is only about structure.

Teaching with Writelike

Vocabulary support