Section B: Composition Answer one question from Section B. Write about 350 to 450 words on one of the following questions. Up to 16 marks are available for ...

What this question is testing

Description and narrative are marked against the same two strands, but they are built differently. A story is held together by cause and consequence; a description is held together by the order in which a watching mind takes things in. The reader of a description should be moved through a subject without being moved through a plot. That is why the highest band speaks of a piece which takes the reader somewhere although nothing happens.

This task names two subjects and a condition: the bridge, the river beneath it, and the hottest hour of a summer day. All three have to be present, and the best pieces are built out of the relation between them rather than out of either alone. The bridge is old, worn and still; the river is moving; the heat acts on both, but differently, because stone stores heat and water carries it away.

Sustaining 350 to 450 words on this scene

Choose a route and hold to it, so that the order of the paragraphs is itself a decision. A descent works well here, and gives the piece somewhere to arrive.

1. Opening, about 60 words. Establish the hour physically rather than by naming it. Heat at its highest is a stillness: no shadow of any length, no wind in the weeds, the air over the parapet visibly unsteady.
2. The bridge from above, about 90 words. The parapet under a hand, the coping stones, the dip worn into the middle of the road surface, lichen in the joints, mortar gone to powder where the sun reaches it and still damp where it does not.
3. Down to the water, about 100 words. The change of temperature in the three steps down the bank. The underside of the arch, where light thrown up off the water moves across the stone in a way nothing else in the scene moves.
4. The river itself, about 90 words. Low summer water: gravel showing, weed combed flat in the current, the different sounds the water makes where it is shallow and where it is deep and silent.
5. Close, about 60 words. Come back up to the detail you opened with and let the reading of the last four paragraphs have altered it.

Technique keyed to this subject

• Make the heat physical rather than adjectival. Stone gives back at four in the afternoon the warmth it took in at noon, and a hand laid on the parapet finds it warmer than the hand. That single fact is worth more than a paragraph about the blazing sun.
• Work the meeting places. Where stone enters water there is a tidemark, a green fur on the lower courses, cooler air trapped under the arch. The best sentences in a piece like this are usually about a boundary.
• Look closely at surfaces and name what you see: lichen in rings, the tool marks left by whoever dressed the stone, a scored initial, the pale line where floodwater once stood. Precision of naming is what the vocabulary strand rewards.
• Give sound and smell real work. Dry weed and warm mud have a smell; water under an arch has an echo; insects over still water have a note. Sight alone will hold a piece at the middle of the range.
• Use the difference in tempo between the two halves of the subject. The bridge has not moved for two hundred years and the river has not stopped for one second, and a piece that notices this has found its own idea rather than borrowing one.

Where responses usually lose marks on this task

• Drifting into the bridge's history, or into a story about somebody crossing it, meeting somebody, or falling in. The task is descriptive and the content mark follows the task.
• Relying on sight alone and leaving out sound, temperature and smell, which the highest band explicitly requires.
• Loading every noun with two adjectives instead of choosing one exact word. Ancient weathered stone is weaker than one accurate noun for the kind of stone it is.
• Generalised summer writing about golden sunlight and gentle breezes, which could describe anywhere and therefore describes nothing.
• Paragraphs of equal length arriving in an order that could be shuffled, which shows a list rather than a plan.

Content and structure: 16 marks (W1, W2)

W1 articulate experience and express what is thought, felt and imagined. W2 arrange and shape ideas so the order itself works for effect. W3 draw on varied word choices and sentence patterns that fit the situation. W4 pitch formality and tone to suit the situation. W5 spell, punctuate and use grammar accurately.

Style and accuracy: 24 marks (W3, W4, W5)

These lists are indicative, not a checklist.