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Argo Academics
Readings

Narrative and creative writing

Stories and descriptive pieces written by Australian secondary students in the practice, published with their consent and credited to them. Each is read for what the writing does rather than for what it scored — the same close reading used in preparation for NAPLAN narrative tasks, scholarship exams and VCE English.

What is taught against these pieces

The moves taught against narrative writing, drawn from the practice's own technique record.

  • Show, Don't Tell

    Conveying feeling and character through action, image and detail rather than naming the emotion outright.

    Hanna, in practiceThe kitten’s desperation is never named. It knocks down the lamp, fights the couch, and registers that “the smell of toast and melted butter wasn’t there today” — the absence of a smell doing the work that a sentence about loneliness would have flattened. Read the piece

  • Complex, Consistent, Unique Character Framework

    Building a character who is complicated, behaves consistently with that complication, and could not be swapped for anyone else.

    Hanna, in practiceThe candle is given a grievance — “not at all happy when the owners decided electricity was the way to go” — and then keeps it. An object holds a consistent, particular resentment across the whole piece. Read the piece

  • Checklist Technique for Descriptive Writing

    Working a description against a deliberate checklist of elements so nothing is left to chance.

    Hanna, in practiceThe sisters’ evening is built element by element rather than summarised — “They made the bed,” the candle “sitting it in the dusty drawer,” then the lamp switched on in its place — so the scene accumulates instead of being announced. Read the piece

  • Logical but Surprising Resolution

    Ending on a turn the reader did not predict but can see, in hindsight, was earned by everything before it.

    Hanna, in practiceThe candle is put away in a dusty drawer and a lamp takes its exact place — “the same spot the candle had before.” Nothing dramatic happens, and the quietness is what makes the displacement land. Read the piece

  • Two-Story / Subtext Technique

    Running a second story underneath the surface one, so the piece means more than it says.

    Hanna, in practiceOn the surface, a kitten wants breakfast and a candle is retired. Underneath, both halves are about being replaced by something newer — the two stories rhyme without either explaining the other. Read the piece

  • Trust-the-Reader Ending / Cut the Final Over-Explanation

    Restraint in narrative endings — resisting the urge to spell out meaning the story has already implied.

    Hanna, in practiceThe piece stops at the lamp switching on. No line follows to explain what the candle felt, and the ending is stronger for the sentence that is not there. Read the piece

  • Mentor-Text Function Annotation (Creative Writing)

    Reading a polished exemplar creative piece and labelling each craft choice by its function in the text, rather than naming the device — asking what it was used to do, not what it is called.

  • Object-Introduction: Withhold and Delay the Subject

    Holding back the subject of a description so the reader assembles it from detail before it is named.

    Hanna, in practice“The candle on the windowsill!!!” arrives as its own line, after the kitten’s panic has already built. The object is withheld until it can land as a discovery. Read the piece

These are drawn from the record of techniques used in lessons. The full archive holds every piece published so far, and the Clinic works the same moves at the level of a single sentence.

Writing of this kind is what the NAPLAN writing task asks for in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and the same moves are what VCE English asks for later, at greater length.