About Anne Vize Writing

I've been writing for over 20 years, and what began as a set of literacy and maths books crafted in a home  office has developed into an exciting career in print and digital content, producing employability skills, life skills, special education and work education resources.

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Working in specialist settings

I started work as a Physical Education and special education teacher, working with teens with health conditions and physical disabilities. I began my teaching career working with young people with severe and multiple disabilities, and soon learnt the importance of recreation, leisure and physical activity for young people with special needs.

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Since then, I've worked with young people with a range of special learning needs in schools and vocational education. I soon discovered that students who have unique learning needs love educational content that respects them as the teens and allows them to grow and develop their skills in a mature way, without lots of clutter and cutesy images taking up learning space on the page. I found that teens enjoying seeing and hearing about characters just like them in narratives. They enjoy reading about people who have experiences similar to their own, and who love lots of the same things as they do. 

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Writing for publishers

I've spent lots of my career writing for educational and specialist publishers, here in Australia and overseas. My work has found its way into the hands of teachers, trainers and families who all seem to have one thing in common - they are looking for something a little different and unique that suits that young person for whom regular, mainstream content just isn't quite working for them. I began writing for Phoenix Education when I pitched an idea to them for a literacy and numeracy concept that would work for students in high schools who needed content that was set at a lower reading level than their age. This eventually became the pair of books 'Literacy for Living Books 1 and 2', which are still found in lots of libraries and schools. Since then I've been fortunate to find publishers such as the team at Teaching Solutions (which later became Essential Resources) as well as Five Senses Publishing and Speechmark (UK) who have all seen the value in books that meet the needs of unique individuals. 

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Accessible content

As an author, it's important to write and make content that is a good fit for the young people who will be using it. For some teens and young adults, content in traditional textbooks and online content can be challenging. There are lots of distractions that take away from the text itself, making reading a combined process of decoding, using context clues, finding meaning and also filtering out irrelevant information. The visual and attention demands of some texts are high, and this can create problems for young people who can lose the intent of the text or struggle to find the details they really need as they try and sort through the colours, shapes, animations and images.

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For some readers, clear and simple text works well. It provides the written content with extra elements added at the point where the reader can manage them well. This is the approach I have always used with my books and digital resources - keeping the text as the central focus, then adding elements that complement the text without being too much of a distraction. 

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