English First Language 0500 | Paper 2 Mock 01 | Directed Writing and Composition

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.

What this question is testing

The two Section B options carry identical marks, so the difference between them is one of construction. A description is organised by perception and holds time nearly still; a narrative is organised by consequence and must move. What the highest band asks of a story is not incident but shape: it should open where it needs to open, develop through a genuine complication, and close with control rather than simply stopping when the words run out.

Here the shaping requirement is the title. A story called The Second Signature has to make the second signature matter to the outcome, not merely mention one somewhere in the middle. The word to concentrate on is second: a signature given twice, withheld the second time, forged the second time, given by the wrong person, or required by a document that nobody expected to need signing again. Choosing which of those you mean is the single decision that determines whether the piece reaches the top bands.

Sustaining 350 to 450 words on this task

Four hundred words is one scene and one decision, not a plot. Keep the cast to two or three people and the span of time to an hour or an afternoon, so that the complication has room to develop instead of being announced. A workable five paragraph shape:

1. Opening, about 70 words. Begin close to the moment that matters, with the document already on the table and somebody unwilling. Background can be released later in a clause; it does not need a paragraph of its own.
2. Who and what, about 80 words. Make the document specific enough to have consequences: a witness line on a will, a discharge form, a delivery sheet, a tenancy agreement, a statement to be countersigned. A signature only carries weight when the reader can see who is bound by it.
3. The complication, about 100 words. The second signature is asked for and something stands in its way. Let the difficulty be human rather than procedural.
4. The turn, about 90 words. Somebody acts, and the act should surprise the reader slightly while being entirely in character.
5. Close, about 60 words. Stop on an image or a small action rather than an explanation. The highest band rewards an ending prepared for by something planted early, so put that detail into the first paragraph and do not draw attention to it.

Technique keyed to this task

• Convey character through what people do with their hands and what they choose not to say. A person who caps the pen before answering has been described more efficiently than by a sentence about their personality.
• Use dialogue sparingly and punctuate it exactly. Two or three exchanges will carry more than half a page of talk, and the accuracy strand is where careless speech punctuation is paid for.
• Plant the ending early. If the story turns on a signature that does not match, the reader should already have seen the earlier one, described in passing, without comment.
• Resist the courtroom. A legal thriller assembled from familiar television conventions is the commonest version of this task and the hardest to score well on, because none of its detail is observed. A signature witnessed in a hospital corridor, a kitchen or a school office is fresher and easier to make specific.
• Keep the reader slightly behind the characters, not slightly ahead. Withheld information is the only tension a four hundred word story has time to build.

Where responses usually lose marks on this task

• Spending most of the words on preliminaries so that the story arrives in the final paragraph, which the mark scheme identifies as a Level 3 failure however good the sentences are.
• A crowded plot with several locations and a large cast, none of them developed.
• A title bolted on: a signature mentioned once, in passing, with nothing depending on it.
• An ending that explains itself, telling the reader what the story meant instead of letting the last action do it.
• Errors in the punctuation of speech, which fall on the accuracy strand and are the most avoidable loss on any narrative task.

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.

What this question is testing

A description is organised by perception and holds time still; a narrative is organised by consequence and has to move through a complication to an end. This task tests the second skill under an additional constraint, and the constraint is not decorative. The words She had been right about the weather, and right about everything else. must appear exactly as given, word for word and with the same punctuation, and they must form the final sentence of the story. Nothing may follow them, and they may not be adjusted to fit. Altering the wording or continuing past the sentence is penalised directly on the content and structure strand, and it is the easiest mark on the paper to throw away.

Building backwards from the given sentence

Read the sentence for what it obliges you to supply. It contains two claims and a relationship. Somebody, a woman, predicted the weather and was right; she was also right about something larger, which the sentence pointedly does not name; and the narrator is the person who did not believe her. A story that earns this ending has to deliver all three. Decide before writing what her larger judgement was, since the ending is worth nothing if the reader cannot infer it.

Sustaining 350 to 450 words

1. Opening, about 70 words. Begin with the disagreement, not with the weather. Put her prediction in early, in one line of speech or one remembered remark, and let the narrator dismiss it lightly.
2. The decision, about 80 words. Something is done against her advice: a journey begun, an event held outdoors, a job accepted, a person trusted. This is what makes her rightness cost something later.
3. The weather arrives, about 100 words. Use it precisely and briefly. It should change the situation rather than become the subject.
4. The larger thing, about 90 words. The second half of the given sentence is earned here, through what the weather exposes about the decision or about the person she warned against.
5. Close, about 60 words, ending on the given sentence. Write two or three quiet lines and then the sentence exactly as printed, with nothing after it.

Technique keyed to this task

• Give her rightness a cost, for the narrator or for her. An ending in which being right is simply satisfying has no weight; an ending in which it is lonely, or too late, has a great deal.
• Keep the weather working as more than scenery. Rain that cancels something, wind that keeps somebody on a platform, heat that makes a room impossible to stay in: weather that acts on the plot rather than decorating it.
• Show her judgement rather than reporting it. One line of speech in the first paragraph, remembered exactly in the fourth, does more than a paragraph of characterisation.
• Leave the last sentence something to do. If the paragraph before it already states that she had been right all along, the given sentence merely repeats what has been said and the ending falls flat. Stop the narration one beat earlier than feels comfortable.
• Check the sentence letter by letter before handing the paper in, including the comma after weather.

Where responses usually lose marks on this task

• Altering the wording of the given sentence, changing its tense, or writing a further paragraph after it.
• Bolting the sentence onto a story that has nothing to do with weather or with anybody being right.
• Making the weather so extreme that the piece becomes a disaster report and the relationship between the two people disappears.
• Explaining the meaning of the ending in the closing paragraph, which leaves the final sentence with no work.
• Errors in the punctuation of speech, which 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.

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.

How the 40 marks are divided

Part (a) is worth 5 marks and is marked point by point, one mark for each creditable comment up to a maximum of five. Part (b) is worth 35: up to 10 for the content you take out of the two texts and up to 25 for the quality of the writing itself. The two strands in part (b) are marked separately and then added, so a fluent speech that never engages with the texts still forfeits most of the reading marks, and a shrewd reading expressed in disorganised prose still forfeits most of the writing marks.

Part (a): what the question is actually asking

This part is new to the paper and it is not a comprehension question. It does not ask what paragraph 2 of Text A describes. A candidate who writes that the hall is silent, that the desks are in rows and that a girl is nervous has answered a question nobody set. The instruction is to explain how the writer uses language to make the hall seem hostile, which means beginning with the words on the page and working outwards to the impression they plant in a reader. Every mark therefore rests on three linked things: a short quotation, an accurate account of what those particular words are doing, and the effect that follows for someone reading them.

Quote a few words at a time rather than whole sentences, and take everything from paragraph 2 only. Work down the paragraph in the order the writer wrote it rather than hunting for named devices. The paragraph is built to be read that way: it makes the room physically unpleasant first, then in its last sentence hands responsibility for that unpleasantness to the adults who selected it.

What separates a 5 from a 3. A three mark answer names techniques accurately and stops there. It says that the writer uses a simile, that the clock is personified, that the vocabulary is negative. Naming a device earns nothing on its own, because the question is about effect. The mark arrives with the word so. The clock is personified so that time stops being something that passes and becomes something with an appetite, feeding on the morning while the students watch it feed. A five mark answer performs that move five times, on five separate details, and never leaves a quotation sitting on the page uncommented.

These are the creditable points available in this paragraph. One mark each, to a maximum of five, and two genuinely different comments on the same quotation may both be credited.

A model answer for part (a), about 120 words

The hall is made hostile before a single question has been read. Desks standing "in rows like gravestones" bury the candidates in advance, so the tidiness a school would call good order is made to look funereal. They are "spaced so that nobody can lean on anybody", which re-reads an ordinary rule about furniture as a statement about the students: isolation has been designed into the room. The air "smells of floor polish and fear", yoking an institutional smell to an emotion until dread seems part of the building rather than a private feeling. Overhead "a clock swallows the minutes", giving time an appetite, and "a hundred children sit and watch it eat" leaves them spectators of their own morning being consumed.

Part (b): 35 marks, and why summary will not earn them

Ten marks here are reading marks, and they are not given for reporting what the two writers say. They are given for weighing it. The difference shows immediately in a sentence. Summary sounds like this: one writer thinks work gathered across the year is fairer and the other thinks the examination is fairer. Evaluation sounds like this: the first writer's strongest evidence is a study of 1,430 students in which the two methods agreed to within four percentage points, while the second writer's is a re-marking of 6,200 pieces in which nearly a third of teacher marks had to be altered and almost all of the alterations were downwards, and the second of those findings is about who does the marking rather than about the method itself, which is why it does not straightforwardly cancel the first.

Read both texts twice before writing. On the first pass, find each writer's claim, the evidence offered for it, and the concession each makes. On the second pass, look for the places where the two texts touch, because that is where the highest marks live.

What each reading objective rewards against these two texts

Where the reading marks are actually won

• By setting one text's evidence directly against the other's and saying which is the better evidence, and why. The Whitmoor study followed students assessed both ways, so it compares methods; the Bramfield re-marking compares markers. Saying so is worth more than either figure on its own.
• By noticing the convergences. Neither writer defends the present arrangement. Both write from inside schools. Both treat teachers' marking time as a real cost that any reform has to pay for. Both argue from the same premise, that assessment should show what a student can actually do, and reach opposite conclusions from it.
• By noticing that the second text proposes a third route, several shorter examinations spread across two years and marked outside the school. The governors are therefore not choosing between two options, and a speech that presents them with two has misread the material.
• By applying a little scepticism in both directions: whether one academy's results transfer, and whether twenty two years of doing both jobs produces expertise, attachment to the familiar, or both.

Shaping a speech of 250 to 350 words

The form is named in the task and it is marked. A speech to a governing body has a room in it: people who must decide something, a fixed slot in an agenda, and a mixed audience of staff, parents and students. Address them directly at the start, keep the register formal without becoming stiff, and let sentence length change when the argument turns, since that is what makes prose sound spoken rather than merely written down. Do not use headings, and do not announce your view in the opening line: a conclusion reached in front of the governors is evidence of evaluation, while a conclusion announced first turns everything after it into justification.

At roughly 300 words you have five short paragraphs. This outline maps material from each text onto each stage.

Where the 25 writing marks go

They go to five things: expressing a case with conviction, ordering it so that the order itself argues, choosing words precisely, pitching the tone at this audience, and writing accurately. The commonest avoidable losses on this question are borrowed wording and mechanical structure. Long stretches carried over from either text depress both the reading strand and the writing strand at once, because copied material is not selection and is not your vocabulary. A paragraph that merely summarises Text A followed by a paragraph that merely summarises Text B is orderly but inert; the marks are in paragraphs that carry an argument forward. Concede one point to the side you do not take, place the concession where it strengthens rather than weakens your case, and make the last sentence do more than repeat the first.

Content: 10 marks (R1, R2, R3, R5)

R1 grasp what a text states openly. R2 grasp what it implies, including attitudes beneath the surface. R3 examine, weigh up and build on its facts, ideas and opinions, backed by evidence. R5 select information and put it to work for a particular purpose.

Quality of writing: 25 marks (W1 to W5)

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.

These lists are indicative, not a checklist.