Essay Writing Guide for A Level and GCSE

A 7-page, in-depth guide to writing essays suitable for A Level and GCSE students. The resource includes a combination of advice and practice activities and covers the following:

1. How to re-draft essays, with strategies to make them clearer and more sophisticated.
2. Writing a hypothesis to start your essay effectively.
3. Using the passive voice.
4. A long list of sentence stems that are suitable for use across the board in literature and language essays.

I originally designed this booklet for A Level writing workshops but now use it with GCSE classes as well. I find it particularly useful at the start of the A Level course, but also at any other point when you want to improve students' essay writing skills. Some of the examples used are taken from a range of essay-writing subjects, not just English, to demonstrate the fundamental principles of good essays which are applicable to a range of subjects. The guide would therefore be useful for other essay-writing subjects with the exception that most of the Sentence Stems section is most suitable for English.