It was the first intervention lesson. Rainbow was nothing short of terrified. Fortunately, she was not alone: Trixie was scowling at the wall, and Twilight was sat next to Rainbow, here to convince her that passing English tests was not impossible.

"So," Mrs Cheerilee told them as she walked into the classroom, "I guess we should start our first intervention lesson with the simple rules." She sat at one of the student desks, in between Twilight and Trixie. "We might as well go back to basics. Using capital letters, full stops, commas and speech marks will make you work so much better." She turned to Twilight. "I assume that you are just here to help Rainbow Dash, Miss Sparkle?"

"Yes, Miss," came Twilight's reply.

"Good, because you are one of my best students this year." Twilight glowed. Jealousy twisted in Rainbow's gut. She would never be as good as Twilight in academic subjects, and it was hard to have a career in sports unless you managed to get into the Olympic sports team or something similar.

Rainbow and Trixie were each given a piece of writing without any structural devices. So those are paragraphs, longer and shorter sentences, and punctuation, thought Rainbow Dash. She was breaking up the difficult parts into smaller chunks of information for her brain to process. Paragraphs are made of sentences, which contain all of the words, and punctuation is all those symbols around the words. She could understand those simple facts.

Soon, she had put in the missing capital letters, full stops, commas and speech marks, and drawn two diagonal lines where there needed to be new paragraphs. She had removed and replaced some words after being told by Twilight that the word "and" was used too many times. Cheerilee marked the work and told the previously worried student that she had found all of the mistakes and corrected them so that the piece was legible. Legible means that you can read it and it makes sense, she logged in her head. After reading the piece a few times, without, then with the corrections, she realised that simple things like capital letters could make her writing so much better. However, she knew that there was still a long way to go.

"Now, for the language devices," Mrs Cheerilee said after marking Trixie's work. "In other words, the words. Let's work on adjectives and nouns for now."

Adjectives describe the nouns, which are usually objects or the names of people or places, Rainbow kept reminding herself in her head while she rewrote the piece. Common nouns are objects or people in general, for example boy, person, table, door. These can be split into concrete or abstract. Concrete is solid, so they're actual objects. Abstract nouns are things that we can't touch or see. These are usually, but not always, emotions. Examples are happiness, anxiety and danger. Twilight marked the work and was surprised at how quickly Rainbow Dash was learning. She left the lesson with more knowledge, a sense of pride, and a piece of homework that she wasn't looking forward to but wasn't exactly dreading, either.

Author's Note

Writing this actually reminded me of some of the basic rules of English! It's very easy to forget these.