HSC English Standard (NSW) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Reading to Write

A module in which students analyse how a text's form, structure and language create meaning, then apply those craft moves in their own composing.

Close reading

Sustained analysis of short passages, attending to diction, syntax, imagery and punctuation to explain how meaning and effect are produced.

Mentor text

A text used as a model whose specific craft choices, such as voice or structure, are isolated and adapted into a student's own writing.

Metalanguage

The specialised vocabulary used to describe texts and writing, including terms such as focalisation, register, motif, syntax and juxtaposition.

Register

The level of formality in language, shaped by audience, purpose and context, ranging from colloquial speech to formal academic prose.

Narrative that shapes world

A story whose values, assumptions or archetypes influence how a culture understands itself, its history or its possibilities.

Master narrative

A dominant, widely accepted story a culture tells about itself that naturalises particular values and marginalises competing accounts.

Counter-narrative

A story told against or within a dominant narrative, challenging its assumptions and offering an alternative account of experience.

Appropriation

The deliberate reworking of an earlier text for a new context, revealing how narratives retain cultural power across time.

Implied values

The beliefs and assumptions a narrative endorses through its choices, which may be supported, complicated or subverted by the text.

Context

The historical, social and political discourses circulating when a text is produced and received, shaping its meanings and values.

Critical study thesis

An arguable interpretive claim about a text that can be contested and supported with evidence drawn from across the whole work.

Textual integrity

The principle that interpretation must account for the whole text, including elements that complicate a reader's preferred reading.

Critical lens

A theoretical perspective, such as feminist or postcolonial criticism, used to generate a particular reading of a literary text.

Reception

How audiences across different periods and contexts have interpreted, valued or contested a text, shaping its continuing significance.

Ambivalence

A quality in a text where competing attitudes or values coexist unresolved, resisting a single confident interpretation.

Individual and collective

The tension in texts between unique personal experience and shared, socially shaped dimensions of human life.

Paradox

A statement or situation that appears self-contradictory yet reveals a truth, often used to capture complexity in human experience.

Anomaly

A deviation from expected behaviour or norms within a text, which often exposes the assumptions governing that society.

Focalisation

The perspective through which a narrative is filtered, determining whose perceptions and knowledge shape the reader's access to events.

Human qualities

Emotions, motivations and behaviours texts represent, such as resilience, grief, ambition or compassion, and how form shapes their portrayal.

Discursive writing

A flexible nonfiction form that explores a topic through digression, anecdote and reflection rather than a single sustained argument.

Reflection statement

A short piece explaining and justifying the craft choices made in a composition, using metalanguage and referencing specific decisions.

Show, don't tell

A technique replacing stated emotion with concrete sensory detail and action so the reader infers feeling from evidence.

Anaphora

Repetition of a word or phrase at the start of successive clauses, used in persuasive writing to build rhythm and emphasis.

Register shift

A deliberate change in formality within a piece, used to signal audience, character voice or a change in emotional intensity.

Prescribed stimulus

A supplied text in Module C whose craft features are analysed and imitated or transformed in the student's own composition.

Imaginative writing

Composition of invented narrative using controlled voice, setting and structure, culminating in a meaningful shift or revelation.

Persuasive writing

Writing that argues a position using evidence, structure and rhetoric, including concession, rebuttal and concrete example.

Vignette

A short, focused piece capturing a moment or impression, often used in Module C to demonstrate compressed, evocative control.

Purpose and audience

The intended effect of a composition and the reader it addresses, which together determine form, register and evidence chosen.

Voice consistency

Maintaining the same persona, tense and register throughout a composition so the piece reads as deliberately controlled.