I was reading Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin the other day and came across a snippet about how the great essayist Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be an extraordinary writer. He recognised that there were things he needed to improve to achieve his ambition, one of which was the range of his vocabulary. To build this he embarked on a programme of 'deliberate practice' in which he re-wrote essays by other people into verse, the metre and rhyme scheme of which demanded building a bank of synonyms for the original vocabulary.
I quite like the idea of using this as a method for expanding KS3 vocab - having to rewrite a section of a non-fiction text into nice regular ABAB quatrains each week, using a thesaurus to help.
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