Real texts, read sharply.

Ten pieces of real writing, a speech, reportage, memoirs, travel writing, each doing a job on its reader. Every text explained method by method, the five question types broken into steps, and a feedback tool that reads your answers the way a teacher would. No grades, ever.

Meet the texts → The five questions → Get Feedback on Your Writing ✎

The anthology

The ten texts

Text 1 · TED talk transcript

The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A storyteller shows how knowing only one story about a people breeds stereotype, and confesses to the habit herself.

Text 2 · Memoir extract

A Passage to Africa

George Alagiah. A reporter in famine-struck Somalia meets a smile he cannot forget, and turns the camera on his own trade.

Text 3 · Travel memoir

The Explorer’s Daughter

Kari Herbert. Watching a narwhal hunt in the far north, torn between the hunted whale and the hunters her community depends on.

Text 4 · Newspaper report

Explorers, or boys messing about?

Steven Morris. A helicopter ditches in the Antarctic sea and a news report quietly decides whether its pilots are heroes or fools.

Text 5 · Autobiography extract

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Aron Ralston. A boulder shifts, a hand is trapped, and an expert outdoorsman narrates his own catastrophe in the present tense.

Text 6 · Newspaper article

Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on

Benjamin Zephaniah. A poet expelled from school looks back at a system that failed him, and tells young dyslexic readers they are the architects.

Text 7 · Travel writing

A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat

Emma Levine. A donkey race through Karachi traffic, fifty vehicles, one photographer, and trouble that starts when the race ends.

Text 8 · Travel memoir

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan

Jamie Zeppa. A new arrival looks out at Bhutan and finds a landscape, and a way of life, her vocabulary can barely hold.

Text 9 · Memoir extract

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald. Two boxes, two hawks, and a grieving writer waiting for the bird that will turn out to be the wrong one.

Text 10 · Autobiography extract

Chinese Cinderella

Adeline Yen Mah. An unloved daughter is summoned to her father’s room expecting punishment, and leaves with her future.

The exam

Five questions, one method each

Section A pairs one anthology text with an unseen text and asks five questions that climb from retrieval (2 marks) to full comparison (22 marks). Each one has its own rules, and most marks are lost to habits rather than ability: quoting where the question says own words, spotting devices without effects, comparing in a bolt-on sentence. The exam skills page has the method for each; every text guide ends with a practice question.

Writing that improves

Feedback, not grades

Paste a 12-mark or 22-mark answer into the marking desk and get margin annotations like a teacher writes on paper: what works, where to push, and whether your analysis moves from device to effect. It challenges technique-spotting every time: naming a simile earns nothing until you say what it does.

How to use this site

Three ways in

Studying a text? Read it in your anthology first (aloud, ideally), then open its guide page and mark up your copy as you go.
Revising? Reread a text, cover the guide’s quotation table and rebuild it from memory, then check.
Practising? Take the practice question from any text page, write for 25 minutes, then run it through the marking desk and redraft.

Teaching the anthology? The teacher area has the scheme of work and assessment guidance.