Y08W30WR The Adolescent Brain

Part 1

How to Write

Informative – Informative report

An informative report presents organised information on a specific topic for a defined audience. It is written for readers who need clear, factual knowledge they can rely on. The tone is precise and impersonal — the writer’s role is to explain accurately, not to offer personal views.

  • Ideas & content: Select the most relevant facts for your topic and audience. Prioritise information that builds understanding, and leave out what does not serve the report’s purpose.
  • Structure & cohesion: Divide your report into clear paragraphs, each with a distinct focus. Open each paragraph with a topic sentence and use connecting words to link ideas across sections.
  • Voice & audience: Write in third person and maintain a consistently factual tone. Avoid personal opinions or casual phrasing — sound like someone who has researched carefully.
  • Language choices: Use precise, subject-specific vocabulary. Write in the present tense for facts and past tense for historical events. Vary sentence length to maintain readability.
  • Conventions: Spell all technical terms accurately. Use commas, colons and full stops correctly to present information clearly.

Common pitfalls: Including facts without connecting them to your purpose — each sentence should build the reader’s understanding, not just add detail. Losing paragraph structure — keep each paragraph focused on one clear idea.

Part 2

Your Task Plan for Today

The brief

Question: Write a three-paragraph informative piece explaining how the brain develops during adolescence, what changes occur and what those changes mean for teenage behaviour and learning. Write for a Year 8 audience in your own words. Focus on what matters most.

Stimulus: Your school’s Year 8 wellbeing program is producing a resource to help students understand themselves. The program coordinators want students to understand that the teenage brain is still developing and that this biological reality explains some of the ways teenagers think, feel and act.

Task Analysis: This task asks you to explain adolescent brain development in three paragraphs for a Year 8 audience. You must explain why the brain changes, what changes occur, and what those changes mean for teenage behaviour and learning. A strong response is clear, specific, and helps readers understand themselves.

Quick Plan

Plan your three paragraphs:

  • Paragraph 1: The brain is still developing during adolescence
  • Paragraph 2: What changes in the teenage brain
  • Paragraph 3: What these changes mean for how teenagers think, feel and behave
  • Focus on information that matters to a Year 8 reader.

Define the key concept

Explain that the adolescent brain is still developing. Teenagers are not just smaller adults — their brains are physiologically different.

Specific changes

Explain key changes — the prefrontal cortex still developing, increased emotional intensity, reward-seeking, etc. Be specific and clear.

Connection to lived experience

Help readers understand how brain development explains teenage experience — why they feel emotions intensely, why risk-taking appeals, why sleep matters.

Tone & voice

Write respectfully to your age group. Your message is that teenage ways of thinking make sense given brain development — not that teenagers are broken.

Ending technique

Close with a perspective that normalises adolescent development — this is how brains work at this age.