From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader

Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown devised a metaphor to represent the construction of a piece of argumentative writing which she deployed over a sequence of lessons. This metaphor helped students reflect explicitly on the way in which an argument is structured over a piece of extended writing.