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

Both Section B tasks are marked on the same two strands, so the choice between description and narrative is not a choice between an easy and a hard option. It is a choice between two ways of organising a piece of writing. A narrative is organised by consequence: this happened, and because of it that happened. A description is organised by perception: this is here, and noticing it leads the eye to that. In a description time barely moves; what moves is attention. The instruction is to describe, so the examiner is looking for a piece in which nothing needs to happen and the reader is still taken somewhere.

On this particular subject the pull towards story is strong, because a hospital at night is where readers expect events. The moment an ambulance arrives, a name is called and followed, or a diagnosis is delivered, the piece is being marked as a thin narrative rather than a strong description, and the content mark is capped low. The stronger instinct is the opposite one: nothing here is an emergency, and the strangeness of the room is that so little is happening in it at an hour when everyone in it is afraid.

Sustaining 350 to 450 words on one waiting area

Fix one hour and one vantage point, then move outward from it. Four hundred words is about five paragraphs, and each should have a job.

1. Opening, about 60 words. Establish the hour through a detail rather than a statement of the time. Something that is only true after midnight will do it: the reception desk closed and its shutter down, the vending machine as the brightest object in the room, the television bracketed high in a corner running with the sound off.
2. The fabric of the room, about 90 words. Light first, because it governs everything else. Ceiling lighting of this kind has no single source and throws no shadow, so faces look flat and the windows turn into black mirrors that show the room back to itself. Then temperature, then the smell, then the floor.
3. The people, about 110 words. Three at most, each given one exact observation and no biography.
4. A small change, about 80 words. Description still needs movement, but the movement should be tiny: a door opening, a name read out slightly wrong, one chair in a bolted run of five going empty, the light outside the window beginning to alter.
5. Close, about 60 words. Return to the detail you opened with and show it changed by everything in between. This is what the highest band means by a closing paragraph that answers the opening one.

Technique keyed to this subject

• Sound is the main material in a room like this, so give it more space than sight. The compressor in the vending machine cutting in and cutting out. A door on a closer taking its time. A two note chime before an announcement. Above all, the particular quality of a silence in which every person is listening for one word.
• Observe people strictly from the outside: hands, coats, shoes, what they are carrying, how long somebody looks at a phone before turning it face down. Situations should be implied and never explained. A man still in his work boots at two in the morning tells the reader everything without a sentence of history.
• Prefer an exact verb to two adjectives. The chairs do not merely stand there; they are bolted in a row of five so that nobody can turn away from anybody.
• Use the room's own vocabulary sparingly and precisely. One correctly named thing, a triage window, a hand gel dispenser, a laminated sign taped at a slight angle, buys more credit than a paragraph of general hospital atmosphere.
• Find the strangeness in ordinary waiting. A magazine so untouched it still lies square. A child asleep across two seats with shoes on. A coat folded and refolded. These are the details that mark a piece as observed rather than assembled.

Where responses usually lose marks on this task

• Turning the hour into a story about an accident or a diagnosis, which caps the content mark however well written the prose is.
• Cataloguing the furniture and the noticeboards in a list whose order could be reversed without any loss, which is the difference between an organised piece and a shaped one.
• Telling the reader that the atmosphere is tense or sad instead of building it from detail. If the detail is right the reader supplies the feeling, and the mark is for the detail.
• Borrowed phrasing about sterile white walls and the smell of disinfectant. Second hand images are penalised on the vocabulary strand precisely because they are available to everybody.
• Unpunctuated or wrongly punctuated speech in a piece that did not need speech at all. If a line of dialogue is used, punctuate it correctly, because errors here fall on the accuracy strand.

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.