So 500,000 English students a year are examined on how to write a short story. Well, this should be brilliant, because being able to write a short story is an art, a gift, a talent that will last long after the GCSE is replaced by who knows what. And do the exam boards give us examples of how to write them? Well, I couldn't find any that my students could write in 45 minutes, and still get top marks. Seriously, not one. So, I wrote some. And then some more. It was more than fun, it was playful, and I felt (I know, we're English and I'm not supposed to talk about feelings) a sense of joy. I was already an author, but now, I was becoming a proper writer. And here they are, over 20 short stories which will teach you to become a writer. Oh, and yes, how to get the top grades in an exam. Then I asked my friend Lee, another teacher and a writer, if he could help me out, so you now have a collection of stories which are awesome. Some of them show you how to get a grade 5 or 6, because you aren't all ready for grade 7, 8 and 9.But follow the tips in this book, and you will be. Because after every story, I show you 10-15 skills in the story. They'll train you to be a writer.And it's OK if you don't want to be brilliant at writing stories, you just want to pass the exam. Because you can just remember a couple, and reproduce them in the exam. Yes, really. That's totally ok, and legal. And you'll find your brain changes them anyway as you write because that's what brains do.So, if you feel the exam grind has drained all the creativity out of education - I've got the cure. Try it.

Most students are advised to answer the description question, because it seems easier than crafting a story with a proper ending. But what does a great description look like? No novelist would risk 300-600 words of description ruining their book. So, 'Descriptive Writing' is not even a thing in the real world.Here I show you the 20 rules for grade 9, and the 16 rules for grades 5, 6 and 7. Here you will learn how to improve your description by at least 2 grades. And here you will find 7 examples of top exam answers, so you can see exactly how it is done.Even better, you'll find sentences, paragraphs and whole answers which you can simply adapt to any question you will ever get in the exam. That's right - you can go into the exam knowing exactly what you are going to write, even before you see the question.And the best bit is a 6 part method. Learn this, and you can ace any question.If you are not sure, join Kindle Unlimited on a 30 day free trial, and read the whole guide for free. Oh, and all my other guides for free. What's not to like?

This guide takes you through Paper 1 and Paper 2 of the new AQA GCSE English Language Exam. Mr Salles teaches you how to aim for the top level 8 and 9 grades. In fact, he shows you how to get 100% and beyond.

The members of an eminently respectable British family reveal their true natures over the course of an evening in which they are subjected to a routine inquiry into the suicide of a young girl.

Most books on teaching ask teachers to be inspirational, to operate at 100 miles an hour with creativity oozing out of every pore. Dominic Salles says that's unsustainable. But you can get brilliant results using some simple practices taken from the myriad of educational research on classroom practices. It isn't a guide to all the extra stuff you should do to become cool and awesome. It is a book that will get you to forget about teaching and think about learning: another way of saying, it will help you to stop stressing about what you do, and get the students to work harder and smarter at what they do. Dominic Salles believes that every teacher can be slightly awesome. And here he shows you how.

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

“If John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, looking at the ‘what’ of art, then David Salle’s How to See is the artist’s reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The ‘how’ of art has perhaps never been better explored.” —Salman Rushdie How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle’s incisive essay collection illuminates these questions by exploring the work of influential twentieth-century artists. Engaging with a wide range of Salle’s friends and contemporaries—from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others—How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres. Salle writes with humor and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist’s eye.