Welcome...

... to the LitWorks.com website, which provides literature and language 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 close textual analysis (of poetry, prose and non-literary writing) an important part of your English 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 Grade 9 upwards, and produced for them a series of study tasks based on actual classroom work as well as on past IB, AP and A level assessments.

 

'These prompts are a terrific tool for generating class discussions, creating short answer exams, or longer essay assignments. I have purchased a number of them and am impressed with each one.'

                                            From our Commendations section

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 a collection) 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
  • William Boyd
  • John Boyne
  • Ray Bradbury
  • Charlotte Brontë
  • Emily Brontë
  • Anthony Burgess
  • Albert Camus
  • Truman Capote
  • Peter Carey
  • Lewis Carroll
  • Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Kate Chopin
  • Sandra Cisneros
  • J. M. Coetzee
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Joseph Conrad 
  • Daniel Defoe
  • Charles Dickens
  • Umberto Eco
  • George Eliot
  • Ralph Ellison
  • Buchi Emecheta
  • Laura Esquivel
  • J.G. Farrell
  • William Faulkner
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald  
  • Richard Flanagan
  • Gustave Flaubert
  • E. M. Forster 
  • Jonathan Safran Froer
  • Robert Frost 
  • Athol Fugard
  • Ernest J. Gaines
  • William Golding
  • Nadine Gordimer
  • Graham Greene
  • Sara Gruen
  • David Guterson
  • Mark Haddon
  • Lorraine Hansberry
  • Thomas Hardy
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Bessie Head
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Khaled Hosseini
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Henrik Ibsen 
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Henry James 
  • Ruth Prawar Jhabvala
  • James Joyce
  • Franz Kafka
  • Ken Kesey
  • Barbara Kingsolver
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • John Knowles
  • Harper Lee
  • Dennis Lehane
  • Doris Lessing
  • Naguib Mahfouz
  • David Malouf
  • Christopher Marlowe
  • Gabriel García Marquez 
  • Yann Martel
  • Dalene Matthee
  • Cormac McCarthy
  • Frank McCourt
  • Ian McEwan

 
  • Arthur Miller
  • Rohinton Mistry
  • Toni Morrison
  • V.S. Naipaul
  • Tim O'Brien
  • Michael Ondaatje
  • George Orwell 
  • John Osborne
  • Sembene Ousmane
  • Wilfred Owen
  • The Pearl Poet
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Chaim Potok
  • Annie Proulx
  • Michael Punke
  • Jean Rhys
  • J.D. Salinger
  • William Shakespeare
  • Mary Shelley
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  • Lionel Shriver
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn 
  • Sophocles
  • John Steinbeck
  • Bram Stoker
  • Jonathan Swift
  • J.M. Synge
  • Paul Theroux
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Mark Twain
  • Alice Walker
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Richard Wright
  • Emile Zola
  • Markus Zusak 

 

  

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

 
 

 



Click on a book cover to find more

 

Shakespeare

Othello

A Study Commentary

The Commentary's line-by-line analysis gives students insight into the play's detail, and helps them develop the skills of close textual comment. It also encourages them to think about what Shakespeare is trying to do and how he is trying to do it.

Macbeth

A Study Commentary

The Commentary is designed to enhance student understanding of the play’s subtleties and the reasons why the characters do what they do. It also assists them with their course work and helps them prepare for whatever they may face in the final exam.

Hamlet

A Study Commentary

The Commentary, scholarly in its focus yet informal in its tone, looks at the play in a refreshingly different way. It helps ‘Hamlet’ – and Hamlet – speak to a young audience in ways that Shakespeare would approve of.

King Lear

A Study Commentary

As a teacher you will find that the Commentary helps you offer imaginative lessons and explore the play with your students in ways that will fully engage them and give you great professional satisfaction.

Textual Analysis

Writing Unseen Commentaries

A Student Help Book

The resource provides students with the opportunity to explore a wide range of short pieces of literature they have encountered for the first time, and offers them a secure framework within which they can develop perceptive textual commentary.

Reading Between the Lines

A Student Help Book

This 280-page resource is designed to support senior students and their teachers working towards a final examination as part of an English course - in particular IB, AP and GCE A Level - with a Language rather than a Literature weighting.

Workbook Editions

Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

A Workbook Edition

This working edition of the General Prologue carries a new translation alongside the original text, detailed explanatory notes and a set of intriguing and penetrative study tasks. It is designed to give students a full sense of the poem’s freshness.

Jane Austen's Persuasion

A Workbook Edition

The margin notes are detailed, encourage perceptive dialogue about the text, and make many suggestions for independent student work. Essay topics in the style of Advanced Placement, IB Language A and GCE A Level are an integral part of the resource.

The WordSmith Prompts

The WordSmith Prompts

Read the pane to the left, then click on the book cover to access more information and a full list of texts.



 

The Paka Mdogo Children's Books

 

 'BOOKS FOR THINKING CHILDREN'


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

 

“Three delightful adventure stories set in Africa… Illustrated brilliantly…reminiscent of Kipling's 'Jungle Book' - sometimes allegorical, always entertaining.”

Books Monthly

 

“All three of the Paka Mdogo stories are charming. The moral lessons are present, but subtly presented and deftly handled...Author Toshack is working on additional books for this series and new adventures for Paka Mdogo. An increasingly long line of children can hardly wait.”

January Magazine

 

“This series of books is creative, clever, and fact-filled.”

                             Eileen Granfors, Amazon ‘Vine Voice’ Reviewer

 

“Interesting adventures, danger and humor, and lots of great animal & Africa learning connections...Special thanks to LitWorks.com for introducing us to these books.”

TeacherDadBooks.blogspot

 

“H.S. Toshack’s great sense of humour adds an extra bite to the ease and flow of his writing.”

 Book Pleasures Review

 

“I can't believe the amount of work which has gone into this! Absolutely fantastic for the IB PYP programme. Great chapter-by-chapter and whole-book activities, linked to UK curriculum as well as PYP.”

Times Educational Supplement Review Comment

 

Free ebook inspection copies (readable on computer) are now available to schools. Click here