In the National 5 English Critical Reading assessment, you will be asked to comment on examples of language in an extract from a Scottish text you have previously studied (and elsewhere in the text).

The length of a sentence isn’t what makes it hard to understand— it’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed. When you’re reading a sentence, you don’t understand it word by word, but ...

In English, our sentences usually operate using a similar pattern: subject, verb, then object. The nice part about this type of structure is that it lets your reader easily know who is doing the ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

Writers can use metaphors and similes to make a comparison and show the similarity between different things. But they can also deliberately use contrasting words and ideas to make us pay attention to ...