This, on top of his unique ability to pitch his lectures at exactly the right level for AS and A-level students, means that he is the perfect person to give this keynote lecture, intended to inspire students to take a genuinely integrated approach to combining language and literature. Simon Armitage Structure, form and language in poetry. As well as being one of Britain's most successful 'new generation' poets, and therefore on most AS and A-level syllabuses, he has the rare ability to be able to speak engagingly about his own poetry. This is a central topic in all the new specifications as well as the old syllabuses. David Crystal is the perfect person to talk about this, not least because his virtuosity as a performer means he can add considerably to words on the page - with voices, accents and dialects.
Students often think that poems are hatched like fresh eggs - perfect and ready to consume.
Students will be given transcripts of the process from notebook to printed page and this will be the basis of U A Fanthorpe's talk. We've asked her because, like Simon Armitage, she is able to speak so fluently and so objectively about her own work. David Banks spent many years as editor of the Daily Mirror. There are plenty of tabloid hacks around but few are able to step back and deconstruct the highly sophisticated business of creating tabloid copy. Students will be given samples of recent tabloid stories as the basis of the lecture.