Describe a coastal scene at low tide.

This is a Section B descriptive task worth 40 marks, assessed on content and organisation together with vocabulary, sentence structure and technical accuracy (W1 to W4). No content knowledge is being tested. The single decision that moves this piece between bands is whether you describe a scene or narrate an event, because a description that acquires a plot stops meeting the task.

What the task demands

'A coastal scene at low tide' fixes a place and a moment. Low tide is the gift in the title: it exposes ground that is normally hidden, so the material is mud, channels, weed, stranded objects, birds working the flats, the smell and sound of drainage, and the line of the returning water. Use it. A candidate who could have written the same paragraphs about any beach has not answered this title.

Reaching Band 5 (33 to 40)

1. Organise by a controlling movement. Description needs a structure that is not chronology. Move the eye deliberately: from the wall down to the mud, out along one channel to the water's edge, then back. A reader should be able to draw your scene.
2. Vary the distance. Alternate the wide view with something very small and exactly seen, a single lugworm cast, a bottle top pressed into silt, the print of a bird's foot. The alternation is what makes a description feel observed rather than assembled.
3. Make sentence structure do the work. Band 5 asks for varied structures used for deliberate effect. A long, accumulating sentence can carry the spread of the flats; a three-word sentence after it can fix one detail. Doing this twice, well placed, is worth more than doing it constantly.
4. Choose precise nouns before reaching for adjectives. 'Samphire', 'shingle', 'gutter', 'sandbar' locate the writing at once. Strings of adjectives ('the beautiful, shining, silver mud') read as effort rather than observation.
5. Keep the register consistent. Ambitious vocabulary that is precisely adapted to purpose scores; a poetic sentence followed by a conversational aside breaks the control the band descriptor asks for.

What holds a piece in Band 3 (17 to 24)

Three patterns, in order of frequency: a person arrives and something happens, so the description becomes a story; every sentence opens with the same subject and verb shape, so the prose is repetitive even when the vocabulary is good; and the piece lists sights without any organising movement, so it ends because the time is up rather than because it is finished.

Technical accuracy

Band 5 requires secure accuracy. Reserve five minutes to check sentence demarcation in particular, because ambitious descriptive writing tends to produce comma splices where a full stop or semicolon is needed.