The ten texts

Speeches, memoirs, reportage and travel writing: ten real texts, each doing a job on its reader. Every guide follows the same method: what the text is doing, the methods that matter, and analysis that always moves from device to effect.

Text 1 · TED talk transcript

The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A storyteller shows how knowing only one story about a people breeds stereotype, and confesses to the habit herself.

Text 2 · Memoir extract

A Passage to Africa

George Alagiah. A reporter in famine-struck Somalia meets a smile he cannot forget, and turns the camera on his own trade.

Text 3 · Travel memoir

The Explorer’s Daughter

Kari Herbert. Watching a narwhal hunt in the far north, torn between the hunted whale and the hunters her community depends on.

Text 4 · Newspaper report

Explorers, or boys messing about?

Steven Morris. A helicopter ditches in the Antarctic sea and a news report quietly decides whether its pilots are heroes or fools.

Text 5 · Autobiography extract

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Aron Ralston. A boulder shifts, a hand is trapped, and an expert outdoorsman narrates his own catastrophe in the present tense.

Text 6 · Newspaper article

Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on

Benjamin Zephaniah. A poet expelled from school looks back at a system that failed him, and tells young dyslexic readers they are the architects.

Text 7 · Travel writing

A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat

Emma Levine. A donkey race through Karachi traffic, fifty vehicles, one photographer, and trouble that starts when the race ends.

Text 8 · Travel memoir

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan

Jamie Zeppa. A new arrival looks out at Bhutan and finds a landscape, and a way of life, her vocabulary can barely hold.

Text 9 · Memoir extract

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald. Two boxes, two hawks, and a grieving writer waiting for the bird that will turn out to be the wrong one.

Text 10 · Autobiography extract

Chinese Cinderella

Adeline Yen Mah. An unloved daughter is summoned to her father’s room expecting punishment, and leaves with her future.

Read each text in your own anthology first, ideally aloud: these are voices before they are extracts. Quotations on this site are kept short; the anthology is the text.