Literature of the Hart

  Sometimes students complete surpass all expectations!  This story is by Anas.  He has been working on it for over 3 months, completing one chapter each week as part of his ongoing tutoring.  I think you will be impressed!  Chapter 1 Butler crashed into Orion’s  study. “What is it Butler?” “It’s… it’s.. Mrs Fowl. She's really sick.” Orion pushed past Butler and sprinted up the grand stairs. When he reached her bedroom, he realized that his mother’s distinct odour was no longer there . Instead, it was replaced with a pretty yet sick fragrance. Orion slowly entered the bedroom. “Mother! What is it?” Mrs Fowl groaned softly. She didn’t reply. Orion panicked and was about to rush to his mother’s bedside table and cry on her shoulder when his scientific brain kicked in. He approached her and examined her. “I’ve never seen this before…”  He decided to call his magical fairy friends to help him. He started speaking into his hand and then stopped. He went a...

EVERYONE wants to do better in exams.  As an English tutor, I train my tutees to plan. Without planning, you can’t write a thoughtful, structured answer to a question.  Without planning, you won’t even write clearly, because you won’t have thought through what you want to say. Without planning, you may not even write relevantly, or you may change your line of argument halfway through an answer. There are so many different ways to plan: mindmaps, bullet points, comparison tables, for example. But what matters most of all is that students take seriously the need to plan, and use that valuable planning time to create the structure for a good quality answer in their exams. Find out more about our  tutoring services   here . Find out more about the  free introductory session   here . Find out more about English  ebooks    here .

MANY students are now approaching their summer exams, and as an English tutor and teacher I have developed a whole range of strategies to help young people succeed in their exams. The first tip is to really understand the mark allocation and timings required for different questions . For example, in English Language GCSE, some questions are worth only 1 or 2 marks, but some can be worth 12 or 16 marks.  And to make it worse, the higher mark questions come later in the paper so that poor timing early on can have disastrous results. If you calculate the available number of marks and divide it by the number of minutes then you can work out how long you can spend on each question.  Usually 1 or 2 mark questions should only take 1 or 2 minutes, but higher mark questions worth 12 or 16 marks should take something like 15 or 20 minutes. Low mark questions should be done quickly. The worst that can happen in a 1 mark question is that you lose just 1 mark. But even if you score ...

Repeating yourself is not always a good thing!  In fact, students can improve their writing by learning not to over-use the same word in a paragraph, substituting repetitions with a wider vocabulary instead. But when it’s done skilfully, repetition can be very powerful. This current series of posts is about learning from that great master of writing, Charles Dickens.  The last post focused on using metaphors and similes, and you can read that here . Towards the end of the extract from Dickens’ novel Hard Times I have been focusing on (you can read it in the first post of the series here ), he uses repetition very powerfully: "I t c ontained several large streets all very like one another , and many small streets still more like one another , inhabited by people equally like one another , who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the ...

In my experience as tutor and teacher, students can improve their writing rapidly by seeing how good writers work and then applying the same techniques themselves. This current series of posts is about learning from that great master of writing, Charles Dickens.  The last post focused on an extract from his novel Hard Times , which you can read here .  Today’s post is about metaphors and similes . Here is the passage again, and I’ve highlighted the metaphors and similes that he uses. "Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage .  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled .  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where...