ENGLISH

YEAR 12 EXAM PREPARATION

Good luck to our Year 12 students as they prepare for their final exams. These students have worked incredibly hard throughout the year to prepare for these assessments that make up a key part of their final VCE results.

• English and EAL: Tuesday 24 October, 9:00AM
• Literature: Thursday 26 October, 3:00PM

There’s still plenty of time to make improvements. For some final tips on how to prepare for the exam, students and families might like to review this article from The Age.

Sam Florence

English Learning Area Manager

2023 WRITER OF THE YEAR

After a faltering start to the year, with no Writer of the Month competition available to students in Term 1, it was delightful to see that this temporary hiatus only seemed to encourage the writers of McKinnon to embrace their usual range of emotional, imaginative, surreal, cutting, experimental, crafty, and, of course, downright weird voices. The poems, stories, inner monologues, dramas, streams-of-consciousness, and peculiar worlds continue to astound.

Fiction this year dealt not only with family, but with self-aware porcelain dolls; it explored memory, frustration, quiet reverie, and giant eyes that consume souls; stories had characters fleeing not only from fire, but also the persecution levelled at young girls with wings. And our poets wrote about funerals, love, ruin, Taylor Swift, water and their mothers - all in a language that demonstrated control and grace.

All up, across the course of the year, we had 36 winners for Writer of the Month who should all be very proud of their work.

With such a range of styles, narratives, poetic feats, and original voices, it was no easy feat to settle on a Writer of the Year. But after much musing and reading and thinking, it became apparent that one writer stood out. Her bittersweet, darkly comic story about temptation, car rides and a demon in the backseat doing terrible impersonations of Mel Gibson stuck with readers long after they read it. 

Congratulations to Anika Deshmukh of 12C for her story, ‘Stigmatic,’ as this year’s Writer of the Year. Anika has won a $150 voucher for Benn’s Books and will have her work published in this year’s Thistle. 

You can read the pieces of all Writer Of The Month winners here.

We look forward to reading many more engaging pieces from students in 2024.

Dr David Dick & Ms Ashley Matthews

Writer Of The Month Coordinators