Re-read Text C, The Night Road Across the Salar, and then answer Question 3. Imagine you are the writer of Text C. Eleven years after the crossing, a travel...

Question 3 is a directed writing task, so before you select any material you must settle four things from the wording of the question.

• Role: you are the writer of Text C, eleven years older than the boy of nineteen who made the crossing. Everything is first person, and the voice should be that of someone looking back with perspective, not reliving the trip minute by minute.
• Form: a magazine article. That means a title or an opening hook, continuous paragraphs, and a shaped ending. It is not a letter, a diary or a report, so there is no greeting, no dated entries and no headed sections.
• Audience: readers of a travel magazine. They have not read Text C, so places and people need a brief introduction, and the register should be lively and personal but controlled, not slang.
• Task: 'a journey that changed the way you see the world'. That phrase governs the whole article; each bullet has to be pulled towards it, and the third bullet is where it is settled.

The three bullets are the plan. They are also a rough shape in time: before, during, after. Each must be addressed, and a response that leaves one thin cannot reach the top content levels.

Material from Text C for each bullet, and how to reword it

Sensible development is credited provided it does not contradict the passage. You may reflect on what the rule about silence turned out to be for, or on what you now say to people who ask about the salar. What you may not do is replace the passage with invented events: a breakdown that never happened, a second driver, a rescue. Invention that displaces the text loses content marks rather than gaining them.

Model article (about 340 words)

Eleven Years of Salt

At nineteen I thought a salt flat was something you looked at. My aunt in Oruro wrote to a driver she knew, and his reply was one line: I could come if I did not speak while he drove. I should have read more into that. I pictured a long white afternoon and one photograph.

What I got was darkness. He would not cross in December daylight: in the wet season the light off the flooded crust takes a driver's sight by midday, and men have circled for hours within view of their own tracks. So we loaded at dusk, forty sacks over the back axle and a spare tyre lashed across the tailgate, and he would not say how long the crossing would take. It depended on the salt, he said, as though the salt had views.

Then the moon rose and the ground stopped existing. A skin of water left by rain in the north had turned the plain into a mirror, and we drove with stars beneath the wheels and no horizon anywhere. At half past eleven he cut the engine and climbed down to look at the salt. The quiet that followed was not an absence but a pressure, and the cold came up through my boots as though the ground had decided to take my heat. Twenty minutes later the front left wheel found a soft place and the truck sat down on its axle. We dug with our hands and a broken shovel, in brine as warm as soup that stripped the skin from my knuckles, and slid two worn planks under the tyre. When it gripped, he laughed, once.

At Llica he drank his coffee standing up and said the only thing he ever said about the place: it wants nothing from you, so never expect it to give you anything. I have carried that for eleven years. I have crossed twice since, by daylight, in buses of people photographing their own shadows, and neither journey took me to the same country.

Reading and content [15]

• Level 6 (13 to 15): A thorough, well-selected response to all three bullets. Ideas from the passage are developed convincingly, plausible detail is added that never contradicts the text, and a consistent, believable voice for the role is sustained.
• Level 5 (10 to 12): A good response covering all three bullets with some development. The voice is mostly consistent and the material is clearly drawn from the passage.
• Level 4 (7 to 9): All three bullets addressed, but unevenly. Some development, some straightforward retelling of the passage. Voice is present but not sustained.
• Level 3 (5 to 6): A basic response. One bullet may be thin or missing. Largely narrative retelling with little sense of role.
• Level 2 (3 to 4): Limited and mostly copied or repeated material, with little awareness of the audience or the form asked for.
• Level 1 (1 to 2): Very little relevant material from the passage.
• 0 marks: No creditable response.

Quality of writing [10]

• Level 6 (9 to 10): Confident, varied and accurate. Register and structure are exactly right for the form. Vocabulary is precise and often original.
• Level 5 (7 to 8): Clear and mostly accurate, with some variety of sentence structure and some well-chosen vocabulary. Register is appropriate.
• Level 4 (5 to 6): Generally clear, with simple structures and some repetition. Errors do not obscure meaning.
• Level 3 (3 to 4): Meaning is usually clear but errors are frequent and sentence structure is limited.
• Level 2 (2 marks): Meaning is often unclear and basic errors are persistent.
• Level 1 (1 mark): Rarely clear.
• 0 marks: No creditable response.

Answers substantially shorter than 250 words are unlikely to reach the upper content levels, simply because there is not room to cover three bullets with development. The most common way to lose marks here is to spend two thirds of the article on the second bullet, which is the most exciting, and then finish the third in a single sentence. Allocate roughly a third of the word count to each bullet before you start writing.