Practice English with freely licensed texts: master works, and works chosen for exam writing.
Admired works, for how English argument, description, and dialogue are shaped.
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
The complete address moves from national origins to sacrifice and then to a renewed civic duty.
Francis Bacon · 1625
Bacon balances the uses, excesses, and proper practice of reading in a chain of compact claims.
Jane Austen · 1813
The famous opening turns a social assumption into irony before revealing character through a married couple’s dialogue.
Oscar Wilde · 1888
Wilde introduces a dazzling statue through visual detail, then lets observers reveal their own values while judging it.
Adam Smith · 1776
Smith makes an abstract economic principle concrete by comparing one untrained worker with a specialized pin factory.
Charles Darwin · 1859
Darwin closes by moving from close observation to governing laws, struggle, and a final image of creative grandeur.
John F. Kennedy · 1961
Kennedy refuses the smaller reading of the day, sets a changed world against an unchanged belief, hands a torch to a named generation, and closes a four-part pledge in five words. The excerpt is the opening five paragraphs.
Sherwood Anderson · 1919
Anderson holds on a porch, a field, and a passing wagon before naming the man, and lets his hands do the work that no stated emotion would do. The excerpt is the opening two paragraphs.
Chosen for the moves an IELTS or TOEFL answer is scored on.
William Strunk Jr. · 1918
Strunk’s rules for deciding when a subject needs dividing and how to keep what you write lean.
Thomas Henry Huxley · 1868
Huxley proposes a game of chess, maps it onto nature piece by piece, and only then states the claim the analogy was built to carry.
John Stuart Mill · 1859
Mill closes his case for free opinion by announcing that it rests on four grounds, then taking them in the order he promised.
William James · 1899
James grounds habit in the body, measures how much of daily life it governs, and draws the consequence for teaching.
Benjamin Franklin · 1791
Franklin narrows each virtue until it carries one short rule, builds a ruled page for recording his faults, and then works through the virtues a week at a time. The numbered list of virtues and the specimen page that stand between these paragraphs are left out.
Max Roser · 2022
Roser opens with three verdicts that sound like they cancel each other, shows how each one-sided story fails, and states what seeing clearly requires. The excerpt is the opening five paragraphs.
NASA Science Editorial Team · 2024
NASA names the Sun, places it, and then explains why a day there is not one length. Every sentence carries a single fact, and the hard idea arrives only after the plain ones have prepared it.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, for a unanimous Court · 1954
Warren names the harm that separation does to children, says modern evidence supports that finding, rejects the contrary language of the older case, and states the holding. The excerpt is the closing passage, without the block quotation it introduces.
Hannah Ritchie · 2020
Ritchie gives food its share of emissions, separates out the part that is grown and never eaten, and then measures that share against aviation and against whole countries. The excerpt skips the citation and chart paragraphs that sit between.