Latest Articles
Free writing tips for all students. We (try to) update it regularly.
What You Need to Know for the New English Advanced Syllabus (2024)
Year 10-12 | 26/01/2026 | Estimated reading time: 15 min - 20 min
Every few years, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) changes most subject syllabuses to better cater to students. Starting from 2026, Year 11 students will be the first to sit the HSC for the...
How to Improve Your Vocabulary
Year 4-6 | 17/01/2026 | Estimated reading time: 3 min - 5 min
One of the most common questions we get from our Year 4, 5 and 6 students is this: 'How do I improve my vocabulary so that I can use it in my writing?' Other than giving you the most straightforward...
Stop Finding Synonyms for 'Show'!
Year 6-12 | 16/12/2025 | Estimated activity time: 5 min - 10 min
One of our pet peeves when marking students’ essays is when it’s clear they’ve simply gone to a thesaurus (a synonym dictionary) and replaced every verb in their essay with a synonym for show...
Show, Not Tell — What Do You Mean?😭
Year 9-12 | 12/11/2025 | Estimated activity time: 20 min - 30 min
Let's be real. You have probably heard the feedback show, not tell a million times, but still have no clue how to actually do it. Like, what do you mean you need to show it's sunny without saying it's sunny...
Practice Questions for 'Show, Not Tell'
Year 9-12 | 12/11/2025 | Estimated activity time: 30 min - 1 hr
Supplementary material
Terms and Conditions
These resources, as with all our lesson materials, are intellectual property created by us. Without our written consent, you must not:
copy or use, in whole or in part, any of our intellectual property;
reproduce, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish, broadcast or circulate any of our intellectual property to any third party.
Please kindly notify us if you find other sites or services plagiarising or charging for these resources.
What You Need to Know for the New English Advanced Syllabus
Year 10-12 | 26/01/2026 | Estimated reading time: 15 min - 20 min
Every few years, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) changes most subject syllabuses to better cater to students. Starting from 2026, Year 11 students will be the first to sit the HSC for the new English Advanced Syllabus (2024).
Don’t worry: this isn’t as daunting as it seems. In this article, we’ll discuss:
1. changes to module descriptions,
2. changes to the prescribed texts, and
3. what this means to you.
The Basic Organisation of English Advanced
If you weren’t already familiar with the structure of Stage 6 English Advanced, this image shows how it is organised, with each grey box corresponding to a school term (generally). This basic organisation remains the same in the new syllabus. However, instead of being called ‘modules’, each section is now referred to as ‘focus areas’.
Image sourced from: https://curriculum.nsw.edu.au/learning-areas/english/english-advanced-11-12-2024/overview
Changes to the Year 11 English Advanced syllabus
In our humble opinions, the Year 11 syllabus also doesn’t change much 😊! The overarching point of Year 11 English is to develop the knowledge and skills required to succeed in Year 12 English, or in NESA’s words, to “[respond to and compose] a wide range of texts and through the close study of texts, [developing] knowledge, understanding and skills in order to use language to shape and make meaning according to purpose, audience and context.”
However, there are a couple of things to note:
1. Small keywords have been changed in Module descriptions, such as in the Reading to Write (2017) syllabus, where the wording changes in the first paragraph from “understand” to “interpret” in “they develop the knowledge to appreciate, interpret, analyse and evaluate the ways texts(...).” This does not impact your analysis of content, which is a positive. It is likely that your teachers will keep using the same texts that they have used for the previous syllabus.
2. In the new syllabus, at least one Australian text studied across the course must now be by an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer, due to new requirements aiming to include texts beyond European and American ones. This allows you to appreciate how diverse cultures interact with literature.
Changes to the Year 12 English Advanced syllabus
In terms of the module descriptions, the new syllabus is quite identical to the old one. However, the Year 12 prescribed texts in the new syllabus changed entirely from 2017.
Texts and Human Experiences
Both English Standard and English Advanced students study this focus area. Like the 2017 version, this study area requires you to understand how texts represent individual and collective human experiences, often analysing how individuals can challenge the collective society. In terms of its prescribed texts, NESA has removed British and American modern and postmodern texts, including Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Daldry’s Billy Elliot. Literary classics like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice are also taken out of the new syllabus. Instead, we only have Australian composers in this study area. These include:
● Australian authors: Jessica Au, David Malouf, Henry Lawson, Richard Flanagan;
● Australian poets: Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood, Samuel Wagan Watson; and
● Australian directors and playwrights: Michael Gow, Rachel Perkins.
Interestingly, Lawson’s selected short stories were part of the old English Standard syllabus (2017) in Module A: Language, Identity and Culture. As NESA shifts the focus of the text from Language, Identity and Culture to Texts and Human Experiences, we anticipate its analysis to be more about themes of rebellion and the power of narratives. Similarly, Gwen Harwood and David Malouf shouldn’t be foreign to some of you who have studied them in Year 10-11. The good thing about this is that all the contextual information that you learnt remains applicable to this study area😊.
What this means to you:
Prescribed texts are usually assigned to you by your teachers, fortunately or unfortunately; you don’t get to choose your own texts. If you are assigned to study Lawson, Dobson, Harwood, or Wagan Watson, then you will have to compose an essay paragraph for each of the short stories/poems, i.e. more for you to write, yay! 🌚
Since we only have Australian texts to study in this focus area, it is important for you to research a few things:
● What constitutes the Australian identity?
● What Australian social, political, historical, and personal contexts have influenced the author in his/her composition of the text(s)?
● How does studying these texts help you appreciate what it means to be Australian?
Comparison of the prescribed texts
Comparison of the prescribed texts in
Texts and Human Experiences
Textual Conversations
The requirements of Textual Conversations also didn’t change much. You still need to compare texts - often across different historical eras - to see:
● what values/concerns endure throughout time, and
● which are challenged and replaced by new social standards.
Compared to the previous focus area, this one didn’t experience so much of a drastic change. Some texts from the old syllabus are being recycled, namely Keats’ poems and Campion’s Bright Star, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Daldry’s The Hours, which means that if your school has already been teaching these texts in past years, you will probably study these as well (and are more likely to get higher marks given that your teachers would have collated years of resources and sample essays✌).
For those of you who are Shakespeare fans (which is none of you), the prescribed texts changed from The Tempest/Hag-Seed, King Richard III/Looking for Richard, to Hamlet/Dickinson’s poetry and Julius Caesar/The Prince. Shakespeare had always been the older of the two texts in the last syllabus, because NESA wants you to know how timeless and pioneering Shakespearean values can be. However, for the new syllabus, we actually have Shakespeare being compared to Machiavelli, whose text was published way before Shakespeare’s time! If you have studied any Shakespearean texts with us before, you would have heard us rambling about the Machiavellian villain many, many times. This time, you will actually study the origin of that phrase in the nonfiction work, The Prince. We think it means you are not only required to analyse how timeless and pioneering Shakespearean values are, but you also need to appreciate that Shakespeare also got his inspiration from older texts.
Comparison of the prescribed texts
Comparison of the prescribed texts in
Textual Conversations
Critical Study of Literature
This focus area is traditionally the one that offers a variety of texts from different contexts, ranging from Shakespeare (again, yes) to David Malouf (again, yes). In the new syllabus, the texts that are recycled include Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (recycled from the English Advanced Common Module) and Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1 (also in Critical Study of Literature before).
Surprisingly, we see Yeats’ poetry, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s Othello, Noonuccal’s My People, which are conventionally texts that year 9-11 students study, coming into the new syllabus. Just like how NESA brought Lawson’s selected short stories from Standard to Advanced in Texts and Human Experiences, we also have a similar situation here - Robert Gray’s selected poems were in the Standard Module B: Close Study of Literature (2017).
Given that Module B has always been one of the hardest modules to study, we think NESA is trying to reduce the difficulty of this study area in the new syllabus! This means that you will (we think) have an easier time analysing the actual texts and should therefore allocate more time to thinking about the insights that you can gain from studying these texts.
Comparison of the prescribed texts
Comparison of the prescribed texts in
Critical Study of Literature
Conclusion
These changes generally mean that teachers may not have as much experience with these texts, but fret not: since everybody starts with less or no training in these focus areas, it’s easier to do better in your cohort if you have a stronger base in essay writing. The principles that you have applied to all your essays throughout Year 7-11, such as:
● researching context,
● linking literary techniques with the composer’s purpose, and
● generating your own insights upon analysing the text,
still remain applicable!
Summary of the Changes
Texts and Human Experiences: You will only study Australian texts
Textual Conversation: More intricate analysis of how one text can influence another text
Critical Study of Literature: Easier texts to analyse!
How to Improve Your Vocabulary
Year 4-6 | 17/01/2026 | Estimated reading time: 3 min - 5 min
One of the most common questions we get from our Year 4, 5 and 6 students is this: "How do I improve my vocabulary so that I can use it in my writing?"
Other than giving you the most straightforward answer—which we have probably told you more than ten times already — to go read 🫵 (seriously though, why do only 10% of you guys read something outside of class?), we would first like to ask you this:
If you are currently attending our writing classes, each week you would have received a vocabulary list consisting of 10 new vocabulary words. Have you consistently used them in your writing every week? 🙃
If your answer is no, then you probably know yourself why your vocabulary isn't improving — and you really should be using the list we give you.
If you have answered yes, then congratulations! You are our model student, and we love what you are doing! To learn how to further develop your vocabulary bank, we are first going to introduce the concept of the Forgetting Curve.
The Forgetting Curve
Originally created by a German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus, the forgetting curve hypothesises why we forget about things over time. Ebbinghaus famously ran experiments on himself for 5 years (from 1880 to 1885) in which he would make himself memorise nonsense syllables like 'DGI' and 'ZKL' and test how well he could remember them after a certain amount of time.
The result of his experiment is the forgetting curve. According to the graph, after one day, you will forget 50% of all new information learned, and after a week, you will forget 90%. So, if we give you 10 new vocabulary words to memorise during class, you probably remember 5 of these when you wake up the next morning. And when you come back to class next week, you will probably only remember 1 of the original 10 words.
How to beat the forgetting curve?
This is a real concern because we don't want to forget all the new words that we have learned after just a week!
Thankfully, Ebbinghaus, along with many modern researchers, have went on and figured out ways to beat the forgetting curve. The key to this is spaced repetition.
Spending time each day trying to recall what you learned will greatly decrease the effects of the forgetting curve and give the curve a 'reset' (as demonstrated in the green lines). This discovery led to the development of many popular flashcard applications that aim to help users retain their memory, such as Anki and Quizlet, which you may have heard of.
So, to improve your vocabulary and properly memorise all the new words you have learned, you need to repeat them, use them in daily conversations, write them down in your favourite notebook, apply them regularly in your writing, and give your forgetting curve a 'reset' each day until the words are encoded into your long-term memory, where they are then retained permanently.
Note: There are many more aspects of memory retention that we didn't explore in this article, such as encoding and retrieval. If you are interested, read: https://nobaproject.com/modules/memory-encoding-storage-retrieval (might be a bit of a difficult read, but see how you go 😀)
Stop Finding Synonyms for 'Show'!
Year 6-12 | 16/12/2025 | Estimated activity time: 5 min - 10 min
One of our pet peeves when marking students’ essays is when it’s clear they’ve simply gone to a thesaurus (a synonym dictionary) and replaced every verb in their essay with a synonym for show. This isn’t good for these reasons:
1. It shows (pun intended🙃) that you haven’t considered the actual effect of the literary technique being used.
2. Words have connotations. Show is a neutral verb, but authors can also show something positively (e.g. illuminate) or negatively (e.g. expose).
We have compiled the following list so that you can choose the right verb to use when explaining the effect of certain literary techniques in your essays and reading comprehension questions. Note that these might not always apply depending on the nature of the text you are analysing.
Simile, Metaphor
Similes and metaphors don't show; they compare A to B.
e.g. The metaphor shows the character's isolation. → The metaphor compares the character's isolation to an abandoned island.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition doesn't show; it contrasts A with B.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole doesn't show; it exaggerates.
Symbolism
Symbolism doesn't show; it represents a deeper meaning.
Personification
Personification doesn't show; it attributes human qualities to inanimate objects.
Imagery
Imagery doesn't show; it engages the audience visually/aurally/gustatorily/tactually/olfactorily.
(Yes, you should know the 5 types of imagery)
Repetition
Repetition doesn't show; it emphasises.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing doesn't show; it builds suspense.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia doesn't show; it imitates sound
Paradox
Paradox doesn't show; it presents a seemingly self-contradictory statement but reveals a deeper truth.
Pathetic fallacy
Pathetic fallacy doesn't show; it attributes human emotions to nonhuman objects.
Activity
Create your own verb bank for other common literary techniques not mentioned. These may include:
● Zoomorphism;
● Satire;
● Irony;
● Euphemism;
● Alliteration;
● Assonance;
● Sibilance;
● Rhyme;
● Enjambment; and
● Any other ones you can think of.
Show, Not Tell — What Do You Mean? 😭
Year 7-12 | 12/11/2025 | Estimated activity time: 20 min - 30 min
Let's be real. You have probably heard the feedback 'show, not tell' a million times, but still have no clue how to actually do it. Like, what do you mean you need to show it's sunny without saying it's sunny?
Let's look at a worked example showing how to fix this. The following is an extract from a piece of flash fiction written by a Year 8 student (TC).
The night covered the sky with a spotted blanket, full of glittering stars. I closed my eyes to feel the tender wind. My thoughts flew out of my mind. I thought back to last year when dad passed away.
Questions for you to consider before we explain our feedback:
1. What would you rate it out of 10?
2. What are some things that TC did well in?
3. What are some areas of improvement?
*We encourage you to get a piece of paper and write down your answers before proceeding to read the following so that you get the most out of this.
Our Feedback
There were several things that ran through our minds when we read this extract.
1. It is clear that TC is trying to 'show, not tell' and should be commended for their effort in employing a series of metaphors and well-chosen adjectives which set up the quiet mood effectively 👏👏👏.
2. The shift in focus is quite natural! As readers, we can follow the description well as it moves from the sky, the stars, the narrator's senses, and then to their thoughts.
3. The characterisation of the narrator is fairly established. We understand that they experienced a recent passing.
4. We are loving the active voice employed!
Now ... in terms of the areas of improvement (we have chosen 3 areas among others):
1. The expressions unfortunately are leaning in to the field of cliché. Comparing the night to a blanket, saying that stars are glittering and that the wind is tender are not uncommon expressions.
2. 'My thoughts flew out of my mind' and 'I thought back to last year when dad passed away' tell the reader what happens rather than showing it.
3. There is too much sensory information in a such a short extract. TC first engaged us visually, but then decided that it is time for the narrator to close their eyes and halted the visual experience. Instead, the imagery transitioned quickly into a tactile one, 'tender wind'. This makes the reader too busy trying to imagine the different senses, which contradicts with the quiet atmosphere that TC is trying to convey.
Actioning the Feedback
So ... how do we fix this? Before we begin our discussion, let's look at the final draft of TC's piece.
Note that this requires multiple editing sessions. It is not realistic to expect anyone to improve significantly just after a few classes. English requires constant practising. Theory alone is not enough, just like all your other subjects 😊.
Breathe in. Let your thoughts loosen. Feel how the midsummer breeze brushes against your skin. Remind yourself of that time, long ago, when dad was still around — how he caressed your cheeks and told you that everything would be okay.
Now breathe out. Recollect your thoughts and hold onto your teddy bear so that your tears won't fall. And tell yourself that you are okay.
Again, some questions to consider:
1. What are some differences between this refined extract and the original one?
2. How did TC strengthen what they were already doing well to begin with?
i.e. the mood, the shift in focus, the characterisation and the active voice
3. What did TC do to work on their areas of improvement?
i.e. the cliché expressions, the show-not-tell sentences 'my thoughts flew out of my mind' and 'I thought back to last year when dad passed away', the sensory imagery.
*We encourage you to get a piece of paper and write down your answers before proceeding to read the following so that you get the most out of this.
You might have realised a few things have drastically changed, including:
1. The most obvious one: the change from 1st- to 2nd-person narration
2. The slower pacing and omission of the action 'closed my eyes'
3. Information we didn't have before: dad caressing cheek, teddy bear and tears
4. The omission of many adjectives and the lack of setting
Why have we done that? How do we show, not tell?
Let's look at how each change addresses the original weaknesses and strengthen the strong points.
1. Change your pacing so that it fits the tone of your story
We particularly liked the active voice and how TC tried to engage the reader with different senses in the original piece. So what better way to do that than to employ 2nd-person narration so that we invite the reader to also experience the narrator's feelings? We have slowed down the pacing significantly, got rid of the action of 'closed my eyes' and solely focused on the breathing and the wind to allow enough time for the reader to explore this sensory experience together.
The other thing that the breathing does is to suggest the emotions that the narrator is currently feeling. It is clear they are trying their best to calm themselves down and not cry. This way you are 'showing not telling' via the pacing and tone.
2. Use descriptions as a chance to deepen characterisation
We also aimed to deepen the characterisation of the narrator by providing some background information. The phrase 'when dad was still around' implies that the narrator's dad has either passed away or is isolated from the narrator. (Note how different this phrase is from its 'telling' version: 'I thought back to last week when dad passed away.')
The addition of 'teddy bear' tells us the narrator's presumably young age - an immediate tear-jerker when we have a young child who has lost their loving dad.
Together, we have successfully provided a 'show, not tell' for the problematic original sentences 'My thoughts flew out of my mind. I thought back to last week when dad passed away.' and have strengthened the characterisation, allowing readers to resonate with the narrator.
3. Take your time to expand on one singular aspect
At this point you might wonder: what about all that setting about the stars and the night?
When editing, it is important for you to decide which part of your writing actually matters and which part doesn't. Because the medium we are dealing with is flash fiction (i.e. <1000 words), we simply don't have enough word count to describe every single detail and turn all our 'tell' sentences into 'show' sentences. Therefore, we need to be selective with the information we want to provide. For this story the focus is on how the narrator reconciles with their grief; describing the night would be unnecessary.
However, if you are composing a piece where the setting has significant implications on the narrator, then by all means describe the setting as much as you want!
The key here is to be both selective and specific. Select what you think is important, and for the aspect that you have selected, be extremely specific with it. Infuse it with details until you are 'showing' instead of 'telling'.
Take Home Points
Figure out if the current pacing of your story fits what you are trying to describe.
When you recognise an area that you need to work on 'show, not tell', think about how you can deepen the characterisation.
Be selective with what you want to focus on. With what you have selected, be specific by adding details.
Be realistic with expectations. Theories will not be transformed into better results if you don't regularly practise.
Practice Questions for 'Show, Not Tell'
Year 7-12 | 12/11/2025 | Estimated activity time: 30 min - 1 hr
Supplementary material
Below are 5 'telling' sentences. Try to convert them into 'showing' sentences using what we have learnt from the article. Take your time with this exercise!
It was dark inside, which scared me.
I practised piano for thirty minutes and my hands started to cramp.
It was a cold winter but he only wore a thin jacket.
They waved energetically when standing.
In front of him there was a forest with a slim path, the giant trees were towering over him.