The 2022 NSW Writing Selective exam has just been completed and has undergone some astonishing changes from previous years. It has become harder to predict but one thing is clear, the format of the question can be misleading and surprising for students who are not prepared. This year's exam explored the future in 2099 and asked students to write a diary entry set in that time period.

Getting started in narratives is often the hardest part. Once a story is begun, it is a lot easier to continue and finish it.

Here in Australia, narratives and stories are required to be taught from a very young age. It is covered as early as kindergarten focusing on one single event and with every year beyond that, it increases in difficulty and complexity in terms of the way it is written and assessed. It is a key component in the NAPLAN test, Selective and all throughout high school including the HSC exam in year 12. There are many components of a narrative but they all will require an introduction.

In most writing tasks in Australian schools, students sometimes struggle to be top performers because they are unable to make their writing stand out. Following a set formula can get you some marks but the ones who get really high all have one thing in common, they incorporate unique twists in their ideas. John goes through some examples of this in popular movies today and breaks them down to show how students can incorporate twists in their own writing to stand out.

If you want to find out the meaning of words you don’t know in reading comprehension texts, how do we do it? There are a few different strategies we can employ. Beyond the long-term strategy of naturally growing your vocabulary, I’ll go through a method that may give you a clue to words you don’t know the meaning of.

Poetry can be annoying to get the full grasp of. From understanding the meaning in comprehension reading exercises to writing your own poems, it is critical to be comfortable with abstract ideas. I share an exercise that we use with our students to help them to begin and understanding the ideas in a poem can be different images in our mind depending on the person. There is no right or wrong way but using this exercise will help your creativity flow. It can be used with students from primary school all the way to students in high school.

The NSW Writing Selective exam has undergone some radical changes. No longer is it a one-dimensional writing task where it is easier to predict the format, instead, it now assesses a broader range of creative writing ability. If you were finding it difficult to adapt to different writing formats or wanted to know how to maximise your marks in the exam, this is the video to watch. You know you need to for the sake of getting into a Selective school, but you don't want to be wasting time on parts of the writing that doesn't yield enough return.