The ideas in this blog post are inspired from reading Storycraft by Martin Griffin and Teach Like a Writer by Jennifer Webb. Teaching writing is somewhat of a dreaded phrase in my English department. We are all Literature lovers and doubt our ability to successfully break down and build back up the components of writing […]
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How are British children responding to the emerging themes and issues in their writing? When OUP was asked if we’d like to be the language expert for a ‘pop up’ 500 Words: Black Lives Matter children’s writing competition, we didn’t hesitate for a moment. OUP has been the language partner to 500 Words since 2012, […]
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What word describes the shape of a Vermicious Knid? Which Roald Dahl character stridulates? And what does snozzcumberophagous mean? These are all things that you can learn from delving into the pages of the new Oxford Roald Dahl Thesaurus.
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This is the message at the heart of National Writing Day which is being celebrated on the 26th June. Over the last year we’ve been interviewing authors including Christopher Edge, Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Gill Lewis. One of the regular questions we ask is their tips for aspiring writers. Here are some of their thoughts: […]
Read moreWith Halloween coming up, we thought we would treat you to a spooky snippet from the fabulous How to Write Your Best Story Ever! by Christopher Edge, to help you create your own terrifying tales… How to write your best SCARY story! What scares you? A haunted house with creaking stairs? A ghostly apparition flitting through the forest? A vampire rising from […]
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From Agent Wonka to Big Friendly Zombies, snozsprouts to puckleberries, this year’s entrants to the BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition show how Roald Dahl’s language continues to inspire them. At the end of Roald Dahl’s much-loved tale of The BFG, the eponymous giant is inspired to take up storywriting, and generations of Dahl’s young readers have done likewise, using […]
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Written by lexicographer Roz Combley There’s nothing like the real thing I was recently lucky enough to analyse the Oxford Corpus, a 55-million-word collection of children’s writing from the BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words story competition. Any lexicographer will tell you that once you’ve worked with a corpus—a wonderfully powerful resource of real language evidence—you […]
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Christopher Edge tells us about the inspiration behind his new book How to Write Your Best Story Ever! A bank-robbing banana being chased by a police pigeon, an accident-prone spy with the nickname Double Oh No!, a crime-fighting baby who googles for clues… These are just a few of the fantastic ideas that children have come up with when I’ve visited […]
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