Core Writing Skills for High School English – Tips for Years 7-12 HSC Students |

Core Writing Skills for High School English – Tips for Years 7-12 HSC Students

04 Aug 2020

At Uplift, we’re known for the quality of our English teaching and learning programs. We’ve helped hundreds of students across New South Wales improve their writing skills. Here are some of the things that we know teachers are looking for from the top, A Range, Band 6 level essays.

Context:

Make sure to analyse and evaluate the role of context in shaping meaning. Good students know that all texts are a product and reflection of the writer’s personal, social, cultural and political context. Ensure that your context statements are specific and add to your analysis of the text. A bit of research never hurt anyone, so make sure that you spend a bit of time doing the research needed to offer conceptual depth and detail to your essays.

Focus on the bigger elements of textual form and style:

Whilst it’s great to memorise all the easy techniques (alliteration, high and low modality, etc), the top-performing students know that these micro-techniques aren’t as important as the macro-techniques. What is a macro-technique? It is a language and/or stylistic convention that is distinctive to the form of the text. Studying Shakespearean Tragedy? Make sure to focus on the importance of soliloquies, asides, dramatic irony, and so forth. Studying poetry? Pay close attention to the form of the poem, the stanzaic structure, metrical schemes, the prosodic features and the figurative elements.

Syntax – Sentence length.

Remember, your writing will become more persuasive if it is comprehensible. Make sure that your sentence lengths are not too unwieldy. Use the fewest possible words needed to make your point. Clarity is key. If your sentence is longer than two lines of typed text, it might be too long. This is just a rule of thumb, so use your better judgment!

Our English courses at Uplift Education are specifically designed to help high school students in New South Wales develop confidence as writers. If you or your child needs support, we’re always here to help. Please call us on 1300 92 92 99 for a free trial lesson in one of our English classes.