Hi Tara. Paper 1 asks you to understand somebody else’s writing. Paper 2 asks you to produce your own, and it is worth exactly the same — half the qualification, eighty marks, two hours. That symmetry matters, because most students spend about ninety per cent of their revision time on reading skills and then discover, in the exam hall, that they have never once practised writing a description against a clock.
Here is the encouraging part. Reading marks depend on how quickly you can decode an unfamiliar text on the day, which is partly luck. Writing marks depend on habits — how you plan, how you open, how you punctuate speech, whether you know how to end. Habits are trainable. Paper 2 is, honestly, the more controllable half of the qualification, and this guide is a training programme for it.
One warning before you start. The 0500 syllabus was revised for first examination in 2027, which is your year. Question 1(a) is new. Most of what you will find online about Paper 2 describes the old paper and will quietly mislead you. Trust this, trust the syllabus, and treat everything else as historical.
Paper 2 at a glance
2 hours · 80 marks · 50% of the qualification. You answer two questions: Question 1 from Section A, and one composition title from Section B. There is no choice in Section A and a choice of four titles in Section B.
| Question | Task | Length | Marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Section A 1(a) | Structured question on the reading text(s), testing R3 and R4 | Short — a focused paragraph | 5 reading |
| Section A 1(b) | Directed writing: a discursive, argumentative or persuasive speech, letter, article or report using the text(s) | 250–350 words | 10 reading + 25 writing = 35 |
| Section B | Composition — choice of four titles: two descriptive, two narrative | 350–450 words | 40 writing |
Weighting: AO1 Reading 20% of this paper, AO2 Writing 80%. The reading text(s) in Section A run to 550–650 words in total. Section B gives you no text at all — just four titles and a blank page.
Two questions, two halves, one hour each
Paper 2 is unusually clean in its shape. There are two sections. You answer one question from each. They are worth forty marks apiece, and you have two hours, so the arithmetic tells you what to do: one hour on Section A, one hour on Section B, and do not let the first hour eat the second. That last clause is the single most common way candidates lose marks on this paper. Section A is comfortable — there is a text in front of you, there are ideas to borrow, the page fills easily. Section B is frightening — there is nothing but a title. So students linger in Section A because it feels productive, and then write a rushed, unplanned, unproofread composition worth exactly the same forty marks.
Notice too the difference in what the two sections ask of you:
| Section A | Section B | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are given | One or two texts, 550–650 words in total, plus a task | Four titles. Nothing else. |
| What it tests | Reading and writing — 15 reading marks, 25 writing marks | Writing only — all 40 marks are AO2 |
| Where the ideas come from | The text. You use, develop and evaluate what is there. | You. Entirely. |
| How long you write | 250–350 words for 1(b), plus a short 1(a) | 350–450 words |
| Choice | None. Question 1 is compulsory. | One of four: two descriptive, two narrative. |
So Section A is reading‑fed writing: your job is to take somebody else’s ideas and do something intelligent with them in a form that has rules. Section B is pure writing: your job is to make something out of nothing and make it good enough to hold an examiner’s attention for four hundred words. Different muscles. Both trainable.
The five writing objectives, in plain English
All the writing marks on this paper — the 25 in Section A and the 40 in Section B — are awarded against these five objectives. They are not a checklist and no examiner ticks them off individually, but the band descriptors are built out of them, so it is worth knowing precisely what each one means and, more usefully, what an examiner physically sees on your page when it is being met.
W1 — Articulate experience and express what is thought, felt and imagined
Plain English: have something to say, and say it as a person rather than as a machine. Content, in other words. Ideas, images, feeling.
What the examiner sees on the page: a detail that could not have been guessed. A specific observation instead of a general one. In a description, the noticing of something a bored writer would have skipped. In an argument, a point that is genuinely yours rather than the first thing anybody would think of.
What kills it: generic content. “It was a beautiful sunny day and everyone was happy” is a sentence that has been written a million times and tells the examiner nothing except that you were not really looking.
W2 — Organise and structure facts, ideas and opinions for deliberate effect
Plain English: shape. The order of your material should be a decision, not an accident.
What the examiner sees on the page: paragraphs of visibly different lengths, because they are doing different jobs. An opening that sets something up and an ending that pays it off. In an argument, a line of reasoning that develops rather than a list of points that could be shuffled. In a description, a controlling movement — the eye travelling, the light changing, the focus narrowing.
The test: could you swap paragraph two and paragraph four without anybody noticing? If yes, you have a list, not a structure.
W3 — Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures appropriate to context
Plain English: variety in how the sentences are built, and precision in the words chosen. Note the last two words — appropriate to context. Range is not the same as showing off.
What the examiner sees on the page: a genuinely short sentence after three long ones. A subordinate clause opening a sentence instead of the eternal subject‑verb‑object. Verbs doing the work that adjectives usually get asked to do. A noun that is exact — sycamore rather than tree, hatchback rather than car.
W4 — Use language appropriate to purpose and to engage the audience
Plain English: sound like the thing you are supposed to be. A speech should sound spoken. A report should sound institutional. A letter to a headteacher should not sound like a text message.
What the examiner sees on the page: register held consistently from the first line to the last. Direct address in a speech. Headings and neutral diction in a report. A tone that suits the reader you have been given — and no lapses into the wrong one halfway through.
What kills it: register collapse. A formal letter that starts “Dear Sir or Madam” and ends “so yeah, please think about it” loses more than it looks like it should, because W4 is judged across the whole piece.
W5 — Make accurate use of spelling, punctuation and grammar
Plain English: technical accuracy. Boring, and worth a great many marks.
What the examiner sees on the page: sentences that are actually sentences. Commas that join what commas may join and full stops where full stops belong. Apostrophes present in possessives and absent from plurals. Speech punctuated conventionally. Consistent tense.
Why this one matters more than students believe: the composition mark scheme splits forty marks into Content and Structure (16) and Style and Accuracy (24). Read that again. The larger share is style and accuracy. A brilliant, original, beautifully imagined description written in comma splices and fragments cannot reach the top bands, because more than half the available marks are sitting in the half you neglected. Section 6 of this guide is entirely about recovering them, and it is the cheapest set of marks on the paper.
Say it, Shape it, Vary it, Suit it, Spell it. W1 you have something to say. W2 you have shaped it. W3 you have varied the sentences and chosen the words. W4 it suits its purpose and reader. W5 it is spelled and punctuated properly. Five verbs, in the order you should worry about them while writing — and in exactly the reverse of the order most students worry about them.
Where the marks actually sit
It is worth being precise about this, because it changes how you spend your time.
| Component | Marks | Assessed on |
|---|---|---|
| Question 1(a) | 5 | Reading only — R3 (analyse, evaluate, develop) and R4 (how writers achieve effects) |
| Question 1(b) — reading | 10 | How well you use, develop and evaluate the ideas in the text(s) |
| Question 1(b) — writing | 25 | A single band judgement across W1–W5: structure, style, register, accuracy |
| Section B — content and structure | 16 | W1 and W2 — ideas, imagination, shape |
| Section B — style and accuracy | 24 | W3, W4 and W5 — sentences, vocabulary, register, technical accuracy |
Two consequences. First, the composition is worth as much as the whole of Section A, so it deserves half your time even though it feels like the small optional one at the end. Second, within the composition, accuracy and style outweigh ideas. That is counter‑intuitive and it is true. A merely good idea, executed with clean varied sentences and precise vocabulary, outscores a wonderful idea executed badly. This should be a relief: you do not need to be a genius on the day, you need to be a careful writer.
Think of it as a ceiling rather than a deduction. Weak accuracy does not remove marks one by one — it caps the band the whole piece can sit in. So the student who writes 450 words of vivid imagery riddled with comma splices does not lose “a few marks for punctuation”. They are placed in a middle band for the entire Style and Accuracy strand, which is 24 of the 40. That is the single most expensive mistake available on this paper, and it is entirely preventable.
Timing: the plan that includes planning
You have 120 minutes. Here is how to spend them. Notice that twelve of those minutes are spent not writing, and that this is deliberate.
| Clock | What you are doing | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 0–8 min | Read the Section A text(s) twice. Underline anything you might use. | Two readings of 600 words is not slow, it is the minimum. The second reading is where you notice the argument the writer is actually making. |
| 8–15 min | Answer 1(a). | Five marks. Short. Do not let it swell — there is no credit past the fifth mark. |
| 15–20 min | Plan 1(b). Form, audience, three or four developed points, an ending. | Five minutes of planning buys more marks than five minutes of extra writing. Always. See below. |
| 20–53 min | Write 1(b). 250–350 words. | Roughly 33 minutes for 300 words is generous. It is meant to be — this is the piece where accuracy is easiest to lose in a rush. |
| 53–60 min | Proofread 1(b). Check the form conventions are actually there. | Seven minutes. See the routine at the end of Section 6. |
| 60–63 min | Read all four Section B titles. Choose. | Choose the one you can be specific about, not the one that sounds most impressive. |
| 63–70 min | Plan the composition. | Seven minutes. This is where descriptions get a shape and narratives get an ending. |
| 70–112 min | Write. 350–450 words. | About 42 minutes. That is roughly ten words a minute, which sounds absurdly slow until you remember you are choosing every one of them. |
| 112–120 min | Proofread. | Eight minutes on the strand worth 24 marks. Obviously worth it. |
Why planning wins
Here is the argument in full, because you will be tempted to skip the planning and I want you to have a reason not to.
Suppose you have five spare minutes. You can spend them writing roughly sixty extra words, or you can spend them planning. Sixty extra words, added to a 400‑word composition, changes nothing about the band you are placed in — the examiner is not counting, and 460 words of the same quality reads exactly as well as 400. But five minutes of planning changes structure, and structure is assessed. It also changes accuracy, because a writer who knows where the paragraph is going makes fewer sentence‑level mistakes than a writer improvising. And in a narrative, planning is the difference between an ending and a stop.
A plan for this paper does not need to be pretty. It needs four things:
- The shape. Four or five paragraph‑jobs in order. Not sentences — jobs. “Arrival, the wrong smell, the woman in the doorway, leaving.”
- The ending, written first. Two or three words telling you where you are heading. Everything else can improvise around a known destination.
- Three or four pieces of specific detail you intend to use, jotted down before you start — a smell, a sound, an object, a number. These are your W1 marks, and they are much easier to invent when you are calm than mid‑sentence.
- For 1(b): the form and the audience, circled, so you cannot forget halfway through that you were supposed to be writing a report.
250–350 for 1(b), 350–450 for the composition. Nobody counts. But the ranges are telling you something real about scale: 350–450 words is about eight to ten paragraphs of ordinary length, or five or six substantial ones. Writing 800 words is not rewarded and usually damages accuracy; writing 200 is genuinely too thin to demonstrate range. Aim for the middle of the range and stop worrying about it.
- I know Section A and Section B are worth 40 marks each and must get an hour each.
- I know 1(a) is 5 marks and 1(b) is 35 (10 reading + 25 writing).
- I know the composition splits 16 content‑and‑structure / 24 style‑and‑accuracy.
- I can say what each of W1–W5 asks for without looking.
- I have a timing plan that includes twelve minutes of planning and fifteen of proofreading.
- I know the four Section B titles are two descriptive and two narrative.
The question nobody has revision notes for
Question 1(a) is new. On the previous version of this syllabus, Paper 2 began straight away with the directed writing task, and the only reading marks available were the ones inside it. From 2027 there is a short structured question first, worth five marks, and it tests two reading objectives:
R4 is the important one, and it is the reason you should pay attention here. R4 was not assessed on this paper before. It lived entirely on Paper 1, in the language question. That means the enormous quantity of Paper 2 revision material floating around — videos, workbooks, past‑paper walkthroughs, the notes an older student might pass down to you — contains essentially nothing about it. Everyone sitting this paper in 2027 is meeting 1(a) for the first time. If you arrive knowing exactly what it wants, five marks that other candidates will fumble are simply available.
The good news is that R4 is a skill you are already building for Paper 1’s language question. The difference is scale. Paper 1 gives you ten marks and 200–250 words. Question 1(a) gives you five marks and expects a focused paragraph — perhaps 80 to 120 words. It is a compressed version of the same thinking, and compression is the whole difficulty.
What the question will look like
Cambridge phrases these questions in a small number of predictable ways. Expect something close to one of these:
- Explain how the writer uses language and structure in paragraph X to influence the reader’s view of …
- Re‑read paragraph X. Explain how the writer conveys her attitude towards …
- Using your own words, explain what the writer means by ‘…’ and why she chooses to express it in this way.
- Explain how the writer’s choice of examples in lines X–Y develops his argument.
In every version, two things are being asked at once: what is the effect (that is R4) and what does that tell us / how does it advance the argument (that is R3). An answer that does only one of the two will not reach five marks however elegant it is.
Explain and analyse ask for different depths. Analyse, in Cambridge’s own definition, means “examine in detail to show meaning, identify elements and the relationship between them” — so it wants you to take something apart. Evaluate means “judge or calculate the quality, importance, amount or value of something” — so it wants a verdict, not a description. If the word evaluate appears in 1(a), you must say whether the technique works, and how well, not merely that it exists.
What a 5‑mark answer actually looks like
Five marks is not five points. It is a band judgement on one short piece of writing, and the bands rise like this:
- Summary (1 mark) Retells what the paragraph says. The writer is invisible; the answer could have been written by someone who did not know the passage had an author.
- Device‑spotting (2 marks) Names techniques — “the writer uses a rhetorical question”, “there is a list of three” — and asserts a generic effect: “this makes the reader think”, “this makes it more engaging”.
- Method with real effect (3–4 marks) Identifies what the writer has done, quotes precisely and briefly, and explains a specific effect on a reader — not “engaging” but what the reader is actually made to feel, notice or concede.
- Method, effect and argument (5 marks) All of the above, plus the connection to what the writer is trying to achieve in the piece as a whole. Often includes a judgement about why this choice, in this place, was the right one.
The jump from three to five is nearly always the same jump: from “this creates sympathy” to “this creates sympathy at exactly the moment the reader was about to side with the council’s figures”. Effect plus placement plus purpose.
When you are stuck, build sentences on this frame and you will find yourself writing band‑five prose almost automatically:
“By [doing X — a precise method], the writer makes the reader [specific effect], which matters here because [what it does to the argument].”
Three clauses: method, effect, purpose. Two of those sentences, plus one short quotation each, is a complete 1(a). Do not write four of them — there is no credit past the fifth mark, and you have thirty‑five more marks waiting.
The stimulus text
Everything in the rest of this section and the next uses the text below. Read it twice before you go on — that is the habit, and it starts now.
Re‑read paragraph 2 (‘Because here is what an underperforming asset does … Six lives with a hole cut in them.’). Explain how the writer uses language and structure here to influence the reader’s view of the bus service. [5]
Three answers to the same question
These are all real‑looking answers of the kind students write. Read each, decide what you think it is worth, then read the verdict.
In paragraph 2 the writer talks about the people who use the bus. She says that Aisha uses it to get home from the hospital after her late shift, and that two sixth‑formers use it to get back from college where they study music, and that Mr Danvers, who is eighty‑one, uses it to visit his friends once a week. This shows that the bus is used by lots of different people who need it, and that if it was taken away they would all be affected badly. It is very important to them.
The writer uses a list of three, describing Aisha, the sixth‑formers and Mr Danvers, which makes the paragraph more effective and engages the reader. She also uses short sentences at the end — “Six seats. Six lives with a hole cut in them.” — which creates emphasis and makes the reader think. There is repetition of “six”, which reinforces her point. The use of emotive language such as “a hole cut in them” makes the reader feel sympathy and shows the writer’s viewpoint clearly.
Okoro opens the paragraph by repeating the council’s own phrase — “what an underperforming asset does” — so that the bureaucratic label is still hanging in the air while she fills it with named human beings; the euphemism is not attacked but quietly disproved. Her three examples are chosen to cover a working adult, two teenagers and a widower, so that no reader can dismiss the service as belonging to somebody else’s life. The closing pair of sentences then contracts violently: after four long, generous clauses we get “Six seats. Six lives with a hole cut in them.” The repetition of “six” forces us to weigh the same small number twice, first as an accounting figure and then as a body count, and the sudden brevity leaves the reader with nowhere to look away. Structurally, this arrives immediately before she concedes that the financial case is strong — so the human evidence is banked before the arithmetic is allowed to speak.
The four horsemen — words that cost you marks
These four phrases appear in almost every low‑scoring 1(a). Ban them from your vocabulary for this question and your answers will improve without any other change, because banning them forces you to say the real thing instead.
| Don’t write | Because | Write instead |
|---|---|---|
| “makes it more effective” | “Effective” is what students write when they cannot say what the effect is | Name what the reader experiences: hesitates, concedes, winces, is caught out |
| “engages the reader” | True of every published sentence ever written | Say what the reader is engaged by, and what it costs them to keep reading |
| “creates emphasis” | Emphasis on what, and why does that word need it? | “forces us to weigh the same number twice” |
| “this shows the reader …” | Almost always followed by a paraphrase, which is R1 at best | “this makes the reader …” — a verb of doing, not of displaying |
Seven minutes, roughly 100 words, and then stop. Question 1(a) is the easiest place on this paper to burn fifteen minutes for no return, because it is short and analytical and feels satisfying to polish. There are five marks here and thirty‑five next door. If you find yourself writing a fourth sentence of analysis, you are donating time to the wrong question.
- I know 1(a) is 5 marks and tests R3 and R4.
- I know R4 is new to Paper 2, so most revision material ignores it.
- I can write a method‑effect‑purpose sentence without using the word “effective”.
- My quotations are short — a phrase, not a sentence.
- I say something about placement: why this, here, in this argument.
- I stop at about 100 words and move on.
What the task is
Using the text or texts you have just read, you write a discursive, argumentative or persuasive piece in one of four forms: a speech, a letter, an article or a report. It should run to 250–350 words. It is worth 35 marks, split ten for reading and twenty‑five for writing — which makes it the single biggest question on the paper, bigger than either composition title.
The task will always tell you three things, and your plan should copy all three down before you write a word:
- The form. Speech, letter, article or report. This is not decoration — conventions are assessed under W4.
- The audience. A public meeting, a headteacher, the readers of a magazine, a committee. Everything about register follows from this.
- The position or focus. Sometimes you are told what to argue; sometimes you choose. If you choose, choose the side you can develop, not the side you privately hold.
The most damaging misunderstanding of 1(b) is that the ten reading marks are earned by including lots of material from the text. They are not. They are earned by using, developing and evaluating that material. A candidate who mentions six ideas from the text and does nothing with any of them scores lower on reading than a candidate who takes three and pushes each one somewhere new. Coverage is not credit.
The second text
Real Section A tasks often give you two short texts with opposing or complementary views. Here is Text B, which answers Text A from the previous section.
Your local council is holding a public meeting about the future of evening bus services in the district. Write a speech to be delivered at that meeting, in which you argue for what you believe should happen.
In your speech you should:
• explain what is at stake for people who depend on the service
• respond to the council’s alternative proposal
• make clear what you want the meeting to decide.
Base your speech on what you have read in both texts, but be careful to use your own words. Write 250–350 words. [35]
The central skill: use, develop, evaluate
This is the whole of the ten reading marks, so it deserves a section of its own. There are four things you can do with an idea from the text, and they are worth wildly different amounts.
| Move | What it looks like | Reading credit |
|---|---|---|
| Lift | Copying or barely rewording a sentence from the text | Almost none — and it can look like you did not understand it |
| Use | Putting the idea in your own words, in a place where it supports your argument | The floor. Necessary, not sufficient. |
| Develop | Taking the idea one step further: a consequence, an implication, an example the text did not give | Solid |
| Evaluate | Judging the idea: how strong is it, what does it miss, who does it favour | Top — this is where the tenth mark lives |
The same idea at four levels
Take one idea from Text B: a fixed route only serves the people who live along it. Watch what happens to it.
The three engines of development
When you have an idea from the text and do not know how to develop it, run it through one of these. Ten seconds each.
- Consequence. “If that is true, then what follows?” Text A says Mr Danvers’s week contracts. Consequence: a district that produces isolated old people will pay for them later, in a form of care that costs considerably more than nine pounds a journey.
- Counter‑argument. “What would the other side say, and what is my reply?” This is the single most valuable habit on this question, because it demonstrates that you have understood both texts rather than agreed with one.
- Evaluation. “How good is this argument, actually?” Is the evidence solid? Is the comparison fair? Who benefits from framing it this way? Whose voice is missing?
Nothing from the text should arrive alone. Every idea you borrow must be followed, in the same paragraph, by something the text did not say: a consequence, an objection, a judgement, or an example from your own head. If a sentence in your answer could be deleted and the text still contain it, it is not earning reading marks — it is quoting them back.
The four forms and their conventions
These conventions are assessed under W4 (language appropriate to purpose and audience) and W2 (organisation). They cost you nothing to include and are noticed immediately when absent.
| Form | Opening | Voice and features | Ending | Trap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speech | Direct address to the actual audience: “Good evening. Most of you know me — I catch the 41 twice a week.” | First and second person. Short sentences you could say aloud without running out of breath. Room for a pause. Occasional rhetorical question. Signals of speech: “Let me put one number in front of you.” | A clear call to action, aimed at what this meeting can actually decide. | Writing an essay and adding “Thank you for listening” at the bottom. If it could not be spoken, it is not a speech. |
| Letter | Named or formal salutation, and a first line that states why you are writing. | Register set by the recipient: formal for an official, warmer for a known individual. Consistent throughout. Paragraphs of one idea each. | A specific request, then a sign‑off matching the salutation (Yours sincerely / Yours faithfully). | Register drift — formal opening, chatty middle. And forgetting to ask for anything. |
| Article | A headline, and an opening that hooks: an image, a figure, a person, a contradiction. | A public but personal voice. Room for anecdote. Can address readers as “we”. Paragraphs shortish; a strong final line to each. | A turn outward — what this means for the reader, or a memorable closing image. | Sounding like a leaflet. An article argues; it does not merely inform. |
| Report | A title, and a first line stating purpose and scope: “This report reviews the case for withdrawing the evening service and recommends …” | Impersonal, measured, third person where possible. Sub‑headings. Evidence before opinion. Recommendations numbered. | A short, explicit recommendations section. | Emotional language. A report may reach a strong conclusion but must sound as if the evidence dragged it there. |
A salutation, a sign‑off, a headline, a sub‑heading, a line of direct address — each takes seconds and each is visible evidence of W4. But do not let them eat the word count. A speech does not need three paragraphs of throat‑clearing before it starts arguing; one line of address is plenty, and then you are into the substance.
Persuasive technique that actually earns marks
Students arrive at this question armed with a list of persuasive devices — the rule of three, rhetorical questions, emotive language, direct address, statistics, repetition — and deploy all of them in 300 words. The result is exhausting to read and scores less than a plain, well‑argued piece. Here is the order of value, highest first.
- The structure of the argument itself. Far and away the most valuable. A piece that moves — establishes stakes, concedes the strongest opposing point, dismantles it, then names what it wants — is persuasive before a single device is applied. This is W2, and it is what separates a top‑band 1(b) from a competent one.
- Concession and rebuttal. The most under‑used move available to you, and it does double duty: it earns writing marks for sophistication and reading marks for demonstrating you understood the opposing text. The shape is: “The council is right that… What that argument cannot explain, however, is…” Give the other side its best version, not a weak one. Attacking a feeble version of the opposing case is the most common way clever students look naive.
- Concrete specificity. One named person, one exact figure, one real consequence beats a paragraph of adjectives. “Nine pounds a passenger” and “an eighty‑one‑year‑old who has never driven” do more persuading than “absolutely devastating” ever will.
- Rhetorical patterning — used sparingly. One rhetorical question in 300 words is a rhetorical question. Four is a nervous tic. One triple, well placed, lands; three triples sound like a school assembly. The rule is: a device the reader notices as a device has failed.
- Emotive vocabulary. Last, and the least valuable, because the examiner has read it a thousand times. “Devastating”, “heartbreaking”, “absolutely crucial” are what writing does when it has run out of evidence.
A full model answer, with the reading marks located
Here is a complete response to the task above — 322 words, a speech, using both texts. Read it once as a piece of writing. Then open the commentary and see exactly where each of the ten reading marks is coming from.
Good evening. My name is Ravi Menon, I live on Harrow Lane, and I have caught the 41 home every Tuesday and Thursday for eleven years.
I want to begin by agreeing with the council, because I think we get further that way. Councillor Petrie is right that a fixed route is a line and not a blanket. There are villages in this district that have never had an evening service and have been quietly paying for ours. That is a genuine unfairness, and nobody in this hall should pretend otherwise.
But an unfairness has two possible cures, and the council has picked the cheaper one. If the trouble with the 41 is that it does not reach far enough, the remedy is to make it reach further. Withdrawing it does not make the unserved villages served. It simply makes all of us equal at nothing.
We are also being asked to make a swap on trust. The whole proposal rests on trials “elsewhere” which are said to carry three times as many passengers per pound. Three times as many as what? In which district? Across how many winters? I would vote for a bookable minibus tomorrow if somebody placed that evidence in front of me. Nobody has.
And there is one word in the councillor’s letter I want to hold up to the light. Forethought. The new scheme, we are told, simply asks passengers for forethought. It is a courteous word. What it means in practice is that a hospital shift which overruns by twenty minutes now costs you your journey home, and that a man of eighty‑one must decide on Wednesday how he is going to feel on Thursday.
So I am not asking you to reject the minibus. I am asking you to refuse the swap. Run both for one year. Publish the figures — ours and theirs. Then come back and tell us which line to draw.
Thank you.
A structure you can reuse for any 1(b)
This shape works for a speech, a letter, an article or a report, and fits comfortably into 300 words. Five paragraphs, sixty words each.
- Establish position and voice Who is speaking, to whom, about what, and what is at stake. Two or three sentences only. Form conventions go here.
- Concede the strongest opposing point In your own words, generously. This is reading credit and it disarms the reader before you have argued anything.
- Develop your best idea One idea from the text, pushed to a consequence the text never states, with a concrete example.
- Evaluate the opposing evidence Not “they are wrong” but “here is what that claim cannot account for”. The single highest‑scoring paragraph available to you.
- Land it What you actually want to happen, in specific terms. A speech asks the room to do something; a report recommends; a letter requests; an article leaves the reader with a thought they cannot put down.
1. Writing the composition instead. Some candidates get carried away and produce a beautiful piece of descriptive prose about a bus at dusk. It is not the task. Directed writing is discursive, argumentative or persuasive — you are making a case.
2. Ignoring one of the texts. If you are given two texts, both must be visible in your answer. A response built entirely on the text you agree with cannot reach the top reading band, because half the reading has not been demonstrated.
- I have copied down form, audience and position before writing.
- Nothing from the text arrives alone — each borrowed idea is followed by a consequence, an objection or a judgement.
- I have conceded the strongest point on the other side, in my own words.
- I have evaluated at least one piece of the opposing evidence.
- Both texts are visible if I was given two.
- The form conventions are actually on the page — salutation, headline, sub‑heading, direct address.
- The ending asks for something specific.
- I have used at most one rhetorical question and one triple in the whole piece.
The most winnable forty marks on the paper
Two of the four Section B titles will be descriptive. They look like this: Describe a market at the end of the day. Describe a room that nobody has entered for a long time. Describe the scene at a station late at night. You write 350–450 words. There is no text, no research, no plot to invent, and nobody can tell you your answer is factually wrong.
Students avoid these titles because description feels harder to teach than story, and they are half right — it is harder to teach. But it is much easier to do well, for a simple reason: a description has no plot to go wrong. A narrative can collapse in its final paragraph and take the whole piece with it. A description cannot. It is 450 words in which every single sentence is a chance to demonstrate W1 and W3, and nothing structural is waiting to trip you up. Once you know the four or five moves in this section, descriptive titles become the safest choice on the paper.
This is the foundation and it is worth stating flatly. In a descriptive composition, nothing needs to happen. There is no problem, no arrival of a stranger, no discovery, no twist. Things may move — a shutter comes down, a gull lands — but they move the way weather moves, not the way a story moves. If your description contains the sentence “Suddenly, I heard a scream”, you have stopped describing and started narrating, and you will be marked as a narrative that spent three hundred words on scenery.
A description needs a shape
Here is the paradox that catches everyone. If nothing happens, what stops 450 words of description from being a list? The answer is that description substitutes a controlling movement for a plot. Something has to be travelling through the piece so that paragraph five could not have been paragraph two. There are three reliable movements, and you only need one.
1. A moving eye
The description travels through space in an order that makes physical sense. Down an aisle, from the door inward, from the horizon to your feet, from the top floor down. The reader is walked somewhere.
Why it works: it gives you a natural paragraph break every time the eye moves, and it stops you circling back to things you have already described.
The signal in the prose: phrases of position doing the work of connectives — at the top of the row… further down… behind her… on the far side…
2. A shifting time
The description occupies a short stretch of time and lets it pass. Six o’clock to half past. Dusk to full dark. The ten minutes before a train arrives and the two after it leaves.
Why it works: change is inherently interesting, and it hands you an ending — the piece stops when the time runs out. It also lets you describe the same thing twice, differently, which is a very high‑scoring move.
The signal in the prose: By six… then the noise changes… by half past…
3. A narrowing focus
The description starts wide and closes in, ending on one small thing seen closely. A whole beach, then one section of it, then one rockpool, then one crab in it.
Why it works: it is the most satisfying of the three to end, because the final image feels earned rather than chosen at random. Cinema uses it constantly and so should you.
The signal in the prose: each paragraph physically smaller in scope than the one before it.
The best descriptions usually run two of these at once — a moving eye that also happens to be narrowing, or time passing while the focus tightens. The model at the end of this section does all three, which is showing off, but it demonstrates the machinery clearly.
No plot, but always a journey. Ask before you start: what is travelling through this piece? My eye, the clock, or my attention. If the answer is “nothing”, you are about to write a list, and a list is the classic middle‑band description — pleasant sentences in an order that could be shuffled.
The five senses — and the four you will forget
Everybody knows about the five senses. Almost nobody uses them, because sight is so dominant that under exam pressure the other four simply do not occur to you. Which is excellent news: a single well‑chosen smell can lift a paragraph out of the middle band, because it is unusual and because it is unfakeable — you cannot write a good smell without having genuinely imagined the place.
| Sense | Weak version | Strong version |
|---|---|---|
| Sound | “It was very noisy” | Name the individual sounds and their texture: the two‑part rattle‑and‑bang of a shutter; a radio with too much bass for its speaker, so that what arrives is not music but the shape music leaves. |
| Smell | “There was a horrible smell” | Smells are specific and they carry association: ice and iron off wet concrete; school disinfectant; the particular staleness of a room shut for a year. |
| Touch | “It was cold” | Temperature on a surface: the cold that comes off tiled walls; the way a metal handrail in winter feels wet when it is only cold. |
| Taste | Usually omitted entirely | Air can be tasted. Dust, salt, diesel, coins. One clause is enough — taste is powerful precisely because it is rare. |
| Sight | “It was beautiful” | Colour with a cause: light “the colour that makes bruised fruit look whole”. Sight is not banned — it is just the one you will do anyway, so make it precise. |
Two more that are not on the list and are worth having. Temperature as a separate sense from touch — the difference in air when you step into a shaded street. And proprioception, which is the sense of your own body: the tilt of a floor, the height of a ceiling pressing down, the effort of a slope. Very few candidates ever use them.
You do not need all five senses in every paragraph — that produces a mechanical, checklist feel that examiners recognise instantly. Aim for one non‑visual detail per paragraph, chosen because it is the most interesting thing available, not because a sense was missing.
Specificity is the engine
If you take one idea from this whole guide, take this one. The quality of descriptive writing is almost entirely a function of how specific the nouns are. Not the adjectives — the nouns.
Specificity is cheap and it compounds. “A tree” becomes “a sycamore”; “a bird” becomes “a gull with one leg”; “an old man” becomes “a man in a jacket a size too big, buttoned wrongly”. Notice that none of these upgrades involve a longer or fancier word — sycamore is not more impressive than tree, it is just more exact. This matters, because it means specificity is available to you even when your vocabulary is under pressure.
Three transformations
Read the left box, then the right, then the verdict. These are the three upgrades that do the most work.
Sentence rhythm, deliberately
Sentence length is the most under‑used tool in the whole of Section B, and it is the easiest to control because it requires no vocabulary at all. Three principles:
- A short sentence after long ones lands like a door closing. “Then the fog arrived.” “A gull lands where the fish was.” “And it does.” The shortness is the effect — nothing else needs to be done to it.
- Vary how sentences begin, not only how long they are. Count the openings in your paragraph. If four of five begin with “The” or “I”, change two of them: start one with a subordinate clause (“Because…”, “Where…”, “Once…”), one with an adverbial (“Further down…”, “By six…”).
- Long sentences are for accumulation; short ones are for verdicts. Use a long sentence when several things are happening at once and you want the reader to feel them piling up. Use a short one when you want a single fact to be unignorable.
How to end a description
Endings are where descriptions are won and lost, because a description has no natural finish line. Four endings that work:
| Ending | How it works | Example shape |
|---|---|---|
| The narrowed detail | Close on one small thing, described precisely, and stop. The smallness after all that breadth does the work. | “What is left on the concrete is a single crushed strawberry, very red.” |
| The return | Come back to the image you opened with, changed by the time that has passed. | Opened with orange light under the awnings; close with “the orange light has climbed the wall and gone”. |
| The departure | Something or someone leaves the scene, and the description leaves with them. | A child carried home over a shoulder, facing backwards. |
| The quiet judgement | One restrained evaluative sentence — not a moral, just a noticing. | “By half past, the market is a corridor of metal doors.” |
What does not work: “And so, as I walked away, I thought about what a wonderful place it had been.” That is the description apologising for itself. Also avoid the sudden event — a scream, a crash, a stranger — which is a narrative ending grafted onto a description because the writer did not know how to stop.
A full model description, with commentary
Describe a market at the end of the day. [40]
By six the light in the market has turned soft and orange and slightly dishonest — the colour that makes bruised fruit look whole again. It comes in low under the awnings, straight down the length of the aisle, and everything it touches has already been half packed away.
At the top of the row the fishmonger is hosing down. The water runs pink for a second and then clear, and the smell lifting off the wet concrete is colder than the air itself: ice, iron, and something sweet underneath that you would rather not identify. He works without looking, the way people do at the end of things, and the hose makes a flat slapping noise against the boards.
Further down, the fabric stall. Bolts of cloth stand upright in their bin like a crowd that has been told to wait, and the woman who owns them is folding a length of green satin over her forearm in movements so practised that they have become a language. Fold, turn, fold. Behind her a radio is playing something with far too much bass for its speaker, so that what reaches the aisle is not music but the shape music leaves behind.
The fruit sellers have begun the last act of the day, which is arithmetic. Three for a pound. Everything on this table, two. Their voices have lost the brightness they had at eleven and gone slightly hoarse, and they are calling now not to the crowd — there is no crowd — but to the four or five people still drifting between the stalls, who know precisely what is happening and are waiting for the price to fall one more time.
And it does. A woman in a grey coat takes a box of plums for almost nothing, and the seller lets her, because the alternative is a bin.
Then the noise changes. The shutters begin coming down along the row, each with the same two‑part sound, the rattle and then the bang, and the aisle fills with the smell of wet cardboard and diesel. A gull lands where the fish was.
By half past, the market is a corridor of metal doors. The orange light has climbed the wall and gone. What is left on the concrete is a single crushed strawberry, very red, and a boy of about six being carried home over his father’s shoulder, facing backwards, watching it get smaller.
The two traps
Overwriting is what happens when a student who knows description should be vivid tries to make every sentence vivid. Three adjectives per noun, a simile in every line, and a thesaurus doing the work that observation should be doing.
This one is much more common, and much sneakier, because it happens gradually. You describe a house for two paragraphs. Then you mention that the door is open. Then you wonder who opened it. Then you go in. By paragraph five you are writing a thriller, and the examiner is reading a narrative that took two hundred words to get started.
You cannot pre‑write a description, because you do not know the title. But you can arrive with three places you know intimately — a kitchen at a particular time, a road you walk, a room in a relative’s house — already observed in detail: four smells, three sounds, two objects nobody else would notice. Almost any Cambridge descriptive title can be bent towards a place you already have in your head, and specificity is far easier to retrieve than to invent under pressure.
- Nothing happens in my description — no event, no plot, no sudden noise.
- Something is travelling through it: my eye, the clock, or my attention.
- Each paragraph has at least one non‑visual detail.
- I have replaced my abstract nouns (busy, beautiful, atmosphere) with the concrete things that caused them.
- At least one sentence per paragraph is noticeably shorter than the rest.
- No noun has three adjectives in front of it.
- My ending narrows, returns, departs or judges — it does not summarise.
Four hundred words is not a novel
Two of the four Section B titles are narrative. They will look like Write a story which involves a decision that cannot be taken back. or Write a story that begins: ‘I had not expected the door to be open.’ or Write a story about a promise.
Here is the single biggest cause of low marks in narrative writing, and it has nothing to do with talent: candidates attempt a plot that would need two thousand words and try to cram it into four hundred. A kidnapping, an escape, a chase, a betrayal, a reunion, and a final revelation — all in a page and a half. The result is not a story but a synopsis of one, and a synopsis cannot demonstrate W1 or W3 because there is no room in it for a single sentence that is not carrying plot.
Look at the arithmetic. 350–450 words is about six to eight paragraphs. If you spend one paragraph establishing a character, one on the setting, one on the inciting event, one on the complication, one on the climax, one on the resolution and one on an epilogue, each of those paragraphs is roughly sixty words. Sixty words is four sentences. You cannot make a reader care about a character in four sentences and also move the plot. Something has to give, and what gives is always the quality of the writing.
One incident. Two or three characters at most. A period of time you could sit through. An afternoon, a bus journey, a game of chess, a conversation at a kitchen table, the ten minutes before someone arrives. That is the correct size for this composition. If your story spans a week, it is too big. If it spans a lifetime, it is a biography.
What a small story needs instead of plot
If you are not going to have events, what carries the piece? The same thing that carries a good short story anywhere: somebody is different at the end from how they were at the beginning. Not transformed — different. They know something they did not know, or they have done something they cannot undo, or they have understood something about a person they thought they knew.
This is the engine, and it is why the small scale is not a compromise but an advantage. A single afternoon has plenty of room for a change of understanding. It has no room at all for a car chase.
- The change should be internal. External events are cheap and hard to make interesting in four hundred words. An internal shift — a realisation, a loss of certainty, the first properly adult decision — costs no plot at all.
- The reader should see it before the narrator says it. Ideally the narrator never says it. Show the moment of understanding through what the character notices, and trust the examiner to be a good reader — they are.
- Small stakes, fully felt, beat large stakes sketched. A grandfather losing at chess is more affecting in 400 words than a war, because you can actually put the reader inside it.
Openings that start in motion
The most common weak opening is scene‑setting: two paragraphs of weather, family background and character description before anything happens. By the time the story starts you have spent a quarter of your words and the examiner has read four hundred versions of the same sunrise.
Start in something. Not necessarily in drama — in motion. Someone is already doing something, already mid‑conversation, already halfway up the stairs. Context can be delivered later, in fragments, while other things are happening; readers are far better at working things out than students expect.
Four openings that work
- Mid‑action: “He always took black.” — a habit, stated as fact, doing character work.
- Mid‑dialogue: “‘You told her,’ she said, and did not sit down.”
- A fact with a hole in it: “There were two coats on the hook, and only one of us was home.”
- A retrospective flag: “I have thought about that afternoon more often than I have admitted.” — use sparingly, but it promises the reader something worth waiting for.
Dialogue: less than you think, punctuated properly
Dialogue is the fastest way to make a story feel alive and the fastest way to fill a page with nothing. In 400 words you can afford perhaps six to ten lines of speech in total. Two principles:
- Cut the greetings. Real conversations begin with “hi, how are you, fine thanks, is Mum in?” and fictional ones must not. Enter the conversation at the sentence that matters.
- “Said” is almost always the right word. Students are taught to avoid it and reach for “exclaimed”, “retorted”, “interjected”, “questioned”. These draw attention to the writing at exactly the moment it should be invisible. “Said” disappears; that is its job. Save the alternatives for when they genuinely mean something (“whispered”, “admitted”).
Get these five right and dialogue becomes free marks instead of a minefield. Every error here is a W5 error, and W5 sits in the 24‑mark half of the composition mark.
1. New speaker, new line. Every time the speaker changes, start a new paragraph. This is the rule most often broken and the most visible.
2. The punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. “Take it,” he said. Not “Take it”, he said.
3. A comma, not a full stop, before a speech tag. “Take it,” he said. If the speech is a question or exclamation, keep its own mark: “Is it free?” she asked. Note the lower‑case “she” — the sentence has not ended.
4. If there is no tag, use a full stop. “It is not free.” She pushed the board an inch away.
5. Interrupted speech takes commas on both sides. “If you take it,” he said, “you will see why.” The second half begins in lower case, because it is the same sentence.
Time compression
A story confined to one afternoon still needs to move, and you cannot write every minute of it. The skill is knowing where to speed up. Three tools:
| Tool | How it looks | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| The summary sentence | “We played on for another twenty minutes and he beat me.” | You need time to pass and nothing important happens in it. One sentence covers twenty minutes; the reader will not object. |
| The white‑space jump | A paragraph break, then “By the time the tea came…” | You want to skip a stretch entirely. Readers assume time has passed at a paragraph break and need only a small signal to confirm it. |
| The slowed moment | Four minutes of chess given a whole paragraph — the hall clock, the hedge being cut, a hand on a knee | The opposite tool, and the more important one. Slow down at the moment of change. The reader’s sense of what matters is set entirely by how much time you give it. |
The pattern to aim for: fast, fast, very slow, fast. Everything compressed except the one moment the story exists for.
Endings
An ending is the last thing the examiner reads before deciding your band, which is an unfair amount of influence and worth exploiting. Three ways to end well and three to avoid:
| ✓ Works | ✗ Does not |
|---|---|
| The stated change. The narrator names, plainly, what is different now — ideally in the flattest possible language, because understatement after tension is powerful. | It was all a dream. It cancels the story you just asked the reader to invest in, and examiners have read it several thousand times. |
| The returned image. An object or gesture from the opening comes back, meaning something different. | The trail‑off. The story simply stops, usually because the candidate ran out of time. This is what planning the ending first prevents. |
| The withheld resolution. The situation is not fixed, but the narrator has decided something. Unresolved is fine; unfinished is not. | The explanation. A final paragraph telling the reader what the story meant and what the narrator learned. Trust the reader; they got there before you did. |
Write the last line in your plan, before the first. Seven words is enough — “she says nothing, which is the point”. Everything you then write is aimed somewhere, which improves the structure, and you cannot run out of time and stop, because you already know where the finish line is. This is the single highest‑value thing on the whole narrative plan.
The same premise at three quality levels
The title: Write a story about a promise. Three candidates, the same idea — a narrator has promised to keep a friend’s secret — and three very different bands.
- Level 1 — the epic (low band) Priya tells the narrator she is running away. The narrator promises not to tell. Priya disappears. There is a police search across three paragraphs. The narrator confesses to Priya’s mother. Priya is found at a station in another city. There is a hospital. Two years later they meet again and forgive each other. Roughly 430 words, eleven scenes, no scene longer than forty words. Nothing can be felt because nothing is allowed to last. The prose is entirely made of plot connectives — then, after that, the next day, meanwhile — and there is not one sentence in it that could be quoted for its writing. This is a synopsis, and it is where most narrative compositions sit.
- Level 2 — the right size, told not shown (middle band) The whole story takes place in one lunch break. Priya tells the narrator her secret; the narrator promises; the narrator spends the afternoon feeling guilty and decides at the end to keep the promise. The scale is now correct, which is most of the battle. But everything is reported rather than rendered: “I felt really guilty and worried about what to do. It was a horrible feeling. I did not know if I was doing the right thing.” The characters are named but not distinguished — you could swap their lines. The setting is generic. There is one internal change, but the narrator announces it directly: “I realised that being a good friend meant keeping her secret.” Competent, unmemorable, and capped by the flatness of the prose rather than by the idea.
- Level 3 — one moment, fully inhabited (top band) The story is a single conversation at a bus stop, and the secret is never stated — the reader works out roughly what it is from what the two girls do not say. The narrator notices things instead of announcing feelings: that Priya has taken her school badge off, that she keeps checking a phone she then does not answer, that when the bus comes neither of them gets on it. The promise is made in four words. The ending is the narrator going home and, at the kitchen table, being asked a direct question by her mother and saying “Nothing” — and noticing that lying is easier than she wanted it to be. Same premise. Fewer events, more story.
A full model narrative, with commentary
Write a story in which a character realises something they would rather not know. [40]
He always took black. White, he said, was for people in a hurry.
We had played on Sunday afternoons since I was seven, on the folding board that lived under his chair, and in eight years I had won twice, both times when he had a cold. So when he pushed a pawn forward and left his bishop standing in the open like a man who has forgotten where he parked, I assumed it was a trap.
I spent four minutes looking for the trap. The clock in the hall did the thing it does between the hours. Outside, somebody was cutting a hedge, badly, in short bursts.
“Take it,” he said.
“It isn’t free.”
“Take it, Nila.”
I took it. He nodded, the way he does when I do something obvious, and moved a knight to a square where it did nothing at all.
That was when I began to feel it, low down, before I had any words for it. I looked at his hands instead of the board. They were the same hands. The nail he lost to a car door years ago was still the wrong shape. But they were resting on his knees now instead of hovering over the pieces, and his eyes were not on the game at all. They were on me, waiting.
I could have taken his queen in three moves. I could see the whole thing laid out, clean as a diagram, and I understood at the same moment that he could not see it — that the board had gone flat for him the way a photograph goes flat — and that he was not letting me win.
I have thought since about what I ought to have done. What I did was move my rook to the wrong square.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he said, “That’s a mistake,” and took it with his bishop, and something came back into his face: not sharpness exactly, but the memory of sharpness, the pleasure of a man who has spotted something.
“You were doing so well,” he said.
“I know.”
We played on for another twenty minutes and he beat me, and I let him, and it was the worst thing I have ever done and I will do it again next Sunday. When my mother came in for the tea things she asked who had won, and he said, “Me,” and looked at me. I said nothing at all, which is the first properly adult thing I ever did.
- My story covers one incident and a stretch of time I could sit through.
- There are no more than three characters.
- Somebody is different at the end, and the difference is internal.
- I start in motion — no scene‑setting run‑up.
- Dialogue is short, tagged mostly with “said”, and every new speaker starts a new line.
- I slow down at the moment of change and compress everything else.
- I wrote the last line in my plan before I wrote the first.
- Nobody wakes up, and nothing is explained to the reader in the final paragraph.
The cheapest marks on the paper
W5 — spelling, punctuation and grammar — is the objective students find least interesting and the one with the best return on effort. Here is why, in one line: the composition splits 16 marks for content and structure against 24 for style and accuracy. More than half the composition mark is sitting in the half you were probably planning to spend the least time on.
And unlike imagination, accuracy is finite. There are perhaps six errors that account for the overwhelming majority of lost W5 marks at IGCSE. Fix those six and your accuracy is essentially solved, permanently, for every paper you will ever sit. This section is that list.
Not by error count. By the effect of the errors on the reader. A piece with four minor slips that never obscure meaning stays in a high band. A piece with four comma splices reads as though the writer cannot hear where a sentence ends, and that is a band‑level judgement about control. This is why sentence‑boundary errors are so much more expensive than spelling: they change how competent the writing sounds.
The six errors that cost the most
1. The comma splice
Two complete sentences joined by a comma. This is the most common serious punctuation error in IGCSE writing and the one that most reliably signals a middle band.
The market was almost empty, and the stallholders were packing up their vans.
The market was almost empty; the stallholders were packing up their vans.
Because it had started to rain, the market was almost empty and the stallholders were packing up.
The test: cover everything after the comma. Could what remains stand alone as a sentence? Now cover everything before it. Could that stand alone? If both answers are yes, you have a splice. Fix it with a full stop, a semicolon, a conjunction (and, but, so, because) or by subordinating one half.
Why students do it: they are hearing a pause and writing the mark for a pause. But a comma is not a pause — it is a grammatical join, and it is not strong enough to join two sentences.
2. Apostrophes
Three rules, and they cover almost everything.
| Situation | Rule | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Missing letters | Apostrophe where the letters were | it is → it’s · do not → don’t · they are → they’re |
| Singular owner | Add ’s | the seller’s hands · Mr Danvers’s week · a day’s work |
| Plural owner ending in s | Add the apostrophe after the s | the sellers’ vans · the girls’ school · three days’ notice |
| Plain plural | No apostrophe. Ever. | tomatoes, buses, the 1990s, DVDs |
The one that catches everybody: its and it’s. “It’s” always means “it is” or “it has” — if you cannot substitute one of those, it takes no apostrophe. “The bus lost its wing mirror.” No apostrophe, because nothing is missing and possessive pronouns (his, hers, ours, theirs, its) never take one.
The other one: your / you’re, their / they’re / there, whose / who’s. In a proofread, hunt these four pairs specifically. They are invisible while you write and obvious when you look for them.
3. Speech punctuation
The full rules are in Section 5, but the two that cost the most marks are worth repeating.
New speaker, new line. Not a new line for each sentence — a new paragraph each time the speaker changes. Dialogue written as a solid block is the fastest way to look inexperienced.
Punctuation inside the quotation marks, and a comma before the tag. “Take it,” he said. Not “Take it.” He said. That full stop turns “He said” into a fragment, so a single mis‑placed dot generates two errors.
4. Sentence fragments
A group of words punctuated as a sentence but lacking a main verb or a subject. There is an important distinction here, because fragments are not always wrong.
The difference: a deliberate fragment is short, isolated, and clearly doing a job — labelling a location, staging a rhythm. An accidental fragment is a subordinate clause that has been cut adrift from the sentence it belonged to, usually because the writer put a full stop where a comma was needed. If your fragment begins with which, because, although, while, when or an ‑ing verb, it is almost certainly the accidental kind. Attach it to the sentence before it.
Budget: at most two deliberate fragments in a whole composition. More than that and they stop reading as control.
5. Tense drift
Starting a narrative in the past tense and sliding into the present, or the reverse. It usually happens at a moment of excitement, which means it happens at exactly the moment the examiner is paying most attention.
The fix: pick a tense in your plan and write it at the top of the page. Both work — past tense is more natural for narrative, present tense can be effective for description — but choose one. In the proofread, read only your verbs.
The legitimate exception: a narrator remembering can move between “I took it” and “I have thought since”, because those are genuinely different times. That is not drift; that is a perfect tense used correctly.
6. Agreement and the long sentence
Subject and verb disagreeing, usually because a long phrase has come between them. “The row of stalls at the far end of the market, all of them shuttered now, were silent.” The subject is row, which is singular, so it should be was. The plural noun nearest the verb has captured it.
The fix: when a sentence runs long, find the subject and the main verb and read only those two words together. Row… was. This is also a useful sign that the sentence may be doing too much.
Paragraphing for effect
Paragraphing is assessed under W2, not W5, but it lives here because it is the other thing an examiner sees before reading a word: the shape of the page. An unbroken block of 400 words signals no structural thinking; twelve paragraphs of two lines each signal no development.
- New paragraph when something changes: time, place, speaker, focus, or the direction of an argument. In a description, every movement of the eye. In directed writing, every new stage of the case you are building.
- Vary paragraph length deliberately. A two‑line paragraph between two substantial ones is a change of pace the reader feels without noticing. The model description uses one for its most important sentence: “And it does.”
- One‑sentence paragraphs are legitimate and powerful, used once or twice. Used six times they become a mannerism.
- Never break a paragraph mid‑idea just to look organised. Examiners can tell, because the second half begins with a pronoun that has no antecedent in its own paragraph.
Vocabulary: ambitious, not fished
W3 asks for a range of vocabulary “appropriate to context”. Students hear “range” and reach for the thesaurus, which produces the single most recognisable species of bad exam writing: the sentence in which every word is one register too grand for the thing it is describing.
Two working rules. Never use a word in an exam that you have not used in conversation or writing before — the exam is not the place to test‑drive vocabulary, because a word used slightly wrongly is more damaging than a plain word used exactly. And put the effort into verbs and nouns rather than adjectives: “the crowd thinned” is better than “the large crowd became gradually smaller”, and it is one word of ambition rather than four of padding.
Ten ways candidates lose marks on Paper 2
Every one of these is preventable, and none of them is about ability.
Section A has a text to lean on, so it feels productive and it swells. The composition then gets fifty minutes, of which none are planning and none are proofreading — and it is worth exactly the same forty marks.
The task says “speech”, and the candidate produces four hundred words of atmospheric prose about a bus at dusk. It happens most often to strong writers, because the descriptive muscle is the one they trust.
Whole phrases and sentences copied out of the source, sometimes with a light rewording. It feels like using the text. To an examiner it looks like the opposite — evidence that the candidate could not process the idea enough to say it themselves.
A “letter” with no salutation and no sign‑off. A “report” with no title, no sub‑headings and no recommendations. A “speech” that never once addresses the people in the room. These are W4 marks lying on the floor.
“Is this fair? Can we accept this? What kind of community do we want to be? Surely we must act?” Four in one paragraph. The candidate believes they are being persuasive; the reader hears somebody who has run out of arguments and is filling the space with punctuation.
Fifteen minutes and three hundred words on a question worth five marks, because analysis is satisfying and the candidate is good at it. There is no credit beyond the fifth mark, so everything after roughly a hundred words is a donation.
Three vivid paragraphs, a promising complication, and then either a rushed summary of everything that was supposed to happen, or a stop. It is always the same cause: the candidate began writing without knowing the ending.
Paragraph one: the sky. Paragraph two: the buildings. Paragraph three: the people. Paragraph four: the noise. Each pleasant, all shuffleable. This scores in the middle band no matter how nice the individual sentences are, because W2 is asking for organisation “for deliberate effect” and there is no effect being aimed at.
A formal letter that opens “Dear Sir or Madam” and closes “anyway, thanks for reading, hope you sort it out”. Or a report that begins neutrally and becomes furious by paragraph four. W4 is judged across the whole piece, so a single lapse in the last line taints all of it.
Not one splice — twenty. The candidate has an internal rule that a comma marks a pause, and since sentences have pauses in them, commas go there. Every sentence boundary in the piece is therefore wrong, and the accuracy strand is capped for the whole composition.
The three‑minute proofread
Not a general re‑read. A general re‑read finds almost nothing, because you read what you meant to write. Instead do three separate passes, each looking for one thing only. Three minutes per piece, and you should do it twice — once after 1(b) and once at the very end.
| Pass | Look only for | How |
|---|---|---|
| Minute 1 Sentences |
Comma splices and fragments | Read from the last sentence backwards to the first. This breaks the meaning, which is the point — you stop reading for sense and start seeing boundaries. Every comma gets the cover test; every full stop gets checked for a main verb after it. |
| Minute 2 Small marks |
Apostrophes, speech punctuation, capitals | Scan for apostrophes only — are they in possessives and missing from plurals? Then its / it’s, your / you’re, their / they’re / there. Then every opening quotation mark: is there a closing one, is the punctuation inside it, does each new speaker start a new line? |
| Minute 3 Shape and task |
Tense, register, conventions, ending | Read your verbs only — consistent tense? Read your first and last sentence together — same voice? For 1(b): are the form conventions on the page, and have you covered every bullet in the question? Look at the page from arm’s length: does it have paragraphs of different lengths? |
A single ruled line through the error and the correction written above it. Do not scribble, do not use correction fluid, do not rewrite whole paragraphs — you do not have time and the examiner does not mind a visible correction. What they do mind is illegibility: an answer that cannot be read cannot be credited, and that is the only genuinely unrecoverable way to lose marks on this paper.
Backwards, then apostrophes, then verbs. Three passes, three minutes, and it is the best‑value time on the whole paper — because it is protecting the twenty‑four‑mark strand, not the sixteen‑mark one.
- I can run the cover test on a comma without thinking about it.
- I know its / it’s, your / you’re, their / they’re / there cold.
- Every new speaker in my dialogue starts a new line.
- My fragments are deliberate, short, and there are no more than two.
- My tense is consistent, and I chose it before I started.
- My paragraphs are of visibly different lengths.
- I have not used a single word I would not use in ordinary writing.
- I have done the three‑pass proofread on both pieces.