TDD 2025

The Art of the Sentence: Essay Writing through Micro Preparation
Novelist John Banville once described the sentence as the ‘greatest invention of civilization’. In this workshop, we’ll explore the powerful role that sentences play in our ability to construct and explore ideas, specifically in the context of essay writing. We’ll consider a variety of high impact sentence stems, grammatical rules, syntactic structures and phrases that, almost tweezer-like, students can pick up and place in a variety of their responses. When their use is honed through frequent practice and exposure, such stems and syntactic formulations can easily be transferred across multiple texts and age-ranges and, with repeated use, their deployment becomes almost automatic, a kind of stylistic flex that students apply almost without thinking. The workshop will cover a variety of specific examples as well as ideas for teaching and modelling them.

Secondary Ages (11-18) with a focus on 14-16