The 2021 CSSA paper presented several confusing questions to Advanced and Standard candidates. Yes, it was the same Module C question for both Standard and Advanced, which seemed a bit cheap to me. Module C was a little better than Module A (which was nightmarishly meaningless), and had two parts. Part A looked like this:... Continue Reading →
Not actually a Module C piece, but rather Texts and Human Experiences. Compare these two versions of an experience. VERSION ONE 7.15am wake up, psych yourself up to face the day. You hit snooze a lot. 7.35am actually get out of bed. Some showering and stuff but it mostly goes by without you really noticing... Continue Reading →
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Use this as the stimulus for the opening of a creative, discursive, or persuasive piece. Use at least one example of figurative language that you have learned about in Module C. So here's an odd thing from... Continue Reading →
Above us, the Milky Way is a slash of sheer silver gossamer, studded with diamonds. The stars of other constellations are in sharp focus, stretching far out into the heavens. Two trains blaze past in the night, sirens and headlights blaring as the signal bells ring on the road next to us. They pierce the... Continue Reading →
Use the image above to write creatively about a character’s response to entering this unfamiliar setting for the first time. Simmo sat on a hard bench near the staircase, which was a wide thing with a strip of red carpet going up the centre. It looked like something a Disney princess would come floating down... Continue Reading →
The 2020 Standard Module C question gave students 40 minutes to Write about a significant place. Begin with the words: This is my world now, and it can be yours too, if you like. A place can soak through your skin like sweat, and ooze into your heart and soul. Breathe it in and let me... Continue Reading →
Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning..., as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. Lynda Davis * Rachel looked like a candle flame, even in her sleep. Outside, a single tent away, I could hear Leah, my... Continue Reading →
a schoolboy on holidays, resting in the still shade, / confident within the granary of empire, wealth / that keeps home secure (John Kinsella, ''After 94 degrees in the shade' by Lawrence Alma-Tadema' * In the edifice of his text, the poet keeps them separated in different poems, like two prisoners who don’t know that... Continue Reading →
How queer and foreign it must seem to you and all the coarse words and cruelty which I now relate are far away in ancient time. Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang * My father is an empty iron suit, a trash-can of quarter-inch metal as crude and dented as a hobo's... Continue Reading →
...were we led all that way for / Birth or death? * Set down this, he said, set down this. And I did, although I was not there as a scribe. I set down his story about following a star in his youth, and how it led him to the land of my own people,... Continue Reading →
The Craft of Writing 