Welcome to Widney's English Department
Welcome to the English Department homepage of our school! We are a team of dedicated and passionate educators who are committed to helping our students develop the critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking skills they need to succeed in school and in life.
We believe that English is essential for all students, regardless of their future plans. Through our rigorous and engaging curriculum, we challenge students to think critically about the world around them, to communicate their ideas effectively, and to appreciate the beauty and power of language.
Our department offers a wide range of courses to meet the needs of all students, from those who are passionate about literature to those who need additional support in developing their English skills. We also offer a variety of extracurricular activities, such as debate team, literary magazine, and creative writing club.
We are excited to have you on our website! We invite you to explore our pages to learn more about our department, our courses, and our extracurricular activities. You can also find information on upcoming events, resources for students and parents, and contact information for our faculty.
Read our syllabi & student handbook here
Text from Handbook & Syllabi
What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
