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NSW Curriculum
NSW Education Standards Authority

11–12English Standard 11–12 Syllabus

Record of changes
Implementation from 2026
Expand for detailed implementation advice

Content

Year 12

The craft of writing

Students strengthen and extend their knowledge and skills as writers. They write for a range of purposes and audiences to convey ideas with power and increasing precision. Through the study of quality texts from the past and contemporary works, students analyse and assess the ways writers use structure, language and form. Through their engagement with these texts, students reflect on the process of writing and apply their knowledge of structure, language and form to create their own sustained and cohesive compositions. They examine how writers of complex texts use language creatively and imaginatively for a range of purposes, to describe the world around them, evoke emotion, shape a perspective or share a vision.

Students generate and explore ideas through discussion and engagement with a range of texts. Through drafting and revising, students experiment with a range of language forms and features, including imagery, rhetoric, voice, characterisation, point of view, dialogue and tone. Students consider purpose and audience to carefully shape meaning in their own imaginative, discursive and persuasive texts. They accurately apply the conventions of syntax, spelling, punctuation and grammar in their own compositions.

Through their critical and creative engagement with these texts, students reflect on the complex and recursive process of writing to further develop their knowledge and application of textual forms and features in their own sustained and cohesive compositions. They compose texts that combine different modes and mediums for a variety of purposes, audiences and contexts.

Students refine and strengthen their own skills in producing imaginative, discursive, persuasive and reflective texts.

Understanding
  • The power of language to express ideas, perspectives and experiences

  • The forms, language features and stylistic choices that shape imaginative, discursive, persuasive and reflective texts

Responding
  • Use different processes to generate, investigate, clarify, organise, refine and present information and ideas

  • Use and manipulate genre in a range of modes and mediums for a range of purposes and audiences

  • Compose texts by changing context, perspective or point of view, and assess the effectiveness of these changes

  • Compose imaginative, discursive, persuasive and reflective texts that make thematic or stylistic connections with other texts and reflect particular values and perspectives, including their own

  • Use appropriate metalanguage to assess and reflect on the ways meaning is made in their own writing and the writing of others

  • Draft, reflect, edit, refine, revise and present texts for a range of purposes and audiences

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