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?


To Students

  • 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...


To Teachers

(By continuing to use the website you will be acknowleding that you are happy to accept our use of cookies - which is minimal - and our privacy policy. See the link at the top of the page.)

 

Five of the study guides have been fully and independently reviewed by the US College Board (see the individual WordSmith Guides pages to read brief extracts from the reviews).

 

STOP PRESS:

 

Given the changing circumstances schools now find themselves in, we are working to adapt the materials we supply to help teachers and students meet the challenges of distance learning.

 

We have:

 

o        Removed the restrictions on copying and editing content from the WordSmith Guides files, to make it easier for teachers (and students) to use the resources selectively and modify them as necessary

 

o        Expanded and updated the Shakespeare commentaries by adding Essay Banks of around two hundred prompts, giving students a wide choice of topic for their thinking, discussion (where possible) and writing

 

o        Introduced automatic discounts for multiple purchase of the printable editions, on a sliding scale of up to 45% for ten or more copies

 

o        Halved the fees for our Site Licence, which allows two-year, on-screen-only access to the resources at a considerable saving

 

 


 

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

Textual Analysis

Workbook Editions

The WordSmith Prompts



 

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