Welcome...

... to the LitWorks.com website, which provides literature resources to students worldwide working towards external examinations – and to their teachers.

What students?

Grades 11-13
Sixth Form
Further Education College

What examinations?

International Baccalaureate
US Advanced Placement
UK GCE Advanced Level

What resources?


  • Are you studying or teaching Shakespeare's Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet or King Lear?
  • Is Jane Austen's Persuasion or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on your exam texts list?
  • Is Poetry and Prose Commentary an important part of your literature studies course?

These downloadable books are designed to help you...


Click on any of the book covers alongside to find out more.

 

Five of the study guides have been fully and independently reviewed by the US College Board. If you would like to read the reviews, click here to reach the AP Central website. Go to the green button AP COURSES AND EXAMS, then to Teachers' Resources, and put Wordsmith in the Search box.

 

New Resources

 

The Wordsmith Prompts

 

 

We have selected a variety of literature texts commonly studied in Grades 10 upwards, and produced for them a series of study tasks based on actual classroom work as well as on past IB and AP assessments.

 

The Prompts are not book-length study commentaries like The WordSmith Guides. Rather, they are outline resources, consisting of a range of questions and assignments designed to take students into the heart of each chapter of a novel (or each scene of a play, or each poem in an anthology) as they have finished reading it. Together they help build up an overview of each of the five SCASI aspects of the whole piece of writing (Setting, Character, Action, Style and Ideas - the fundamental structure of The WordSmith Guides themselves).

 

Prompts are available for works by the following authors (and we are steadily adding more authors and texts to the list):

 

    

 

 

  • Chinua Achebe
  • Maya Angelou
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Jane Austen
  • Mariama Bâ
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Charlotte Brontë
  • Emily Brontë
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Charles Dickens
  • Daniel Defoe
  • George Eliot
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • E. M. Forster
  • Robert Frost
  • Athol Fugard
  • William Golding
  • Nadine Gordimer

 

  

  • Thomas Hardy
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Khaled Hosseini
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Ruth Prawar Jhabvala
  • John Knowles
  • Harper Lee
  • Doris Lessing
  • Dalene Matthee
  • Frank McCourt
  • Arthur Miller
  • George Orwell
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Jean Rhys
  • Mary Shelley
  • Paul Theroux
  • Richard Wright
  • Markus Zusak

 

  

 

 

For more details, click on the WordSmith Prompts book cover to the right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resources for younger children: see below...

Click on a book cover to find more

 

Shakespeare

Unseen Commentary

Workbook Editions

The WordSmith Prompts



 

The Paka Mdogo Books

Teachers: if you have an interest in locating a series of entertaining children's novels for use with 7-12 year olds, with free resources designed to help students improve their reading, writing and interpretive skills, click on any one of the book covers above.

 

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