Antony West (Author)

Writing isn’t just about imagination; it’s a craft with a set of tools. You wouldn’t send a carpenter to work without a hammer, would you? The same goes for our young writers. Alex Quigley, an expert on explicit vocabulary instruction, would tell us that words are our most valuable resource. We need to teach them, explicitly and unashamedly. Create ‘word banks’ for different settings or moods. Get students to play with different types of sentence starters. Let’s make sure they have a full toolkit before they start to build their narrative. A carpenter without a hammer is a frustrated artist. A writer without words is just a daydreamer with a pen.