| | The use of “epitome” is a sophisticated without being overly complicated |
The phrase “a shadow if its former glory” uses vocabulary successfully to develop the description | ||
| The image of the lively house is contrasted with the word ‘dead’ to add emphasis | |
The focus on time adverbials emphasise the change e.g. “now”, “no longer” and “once” |
Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation |
| | The separation of the clauses using a semi-colon in this long sentence is effective as the second phrase directly builds on the first |
Below is an example of a full-mark Level 4 model story:
|
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Sam is a graduate in English Language and Literature, specialising in journalism and the history and varieties of English. Before teaching, Sam had a career in tourism in South Africa and Europe. After training to become a teacher, Sam taught English Language and Literature and Communication and Culture in three outstanding secondary schools across England. Her teaching experience began in nursery schools, where she achieved a qualification in Early Years Foundation education. Sam went on to train in the SEN department of a secondary school, working closely with visually impaired students. From there, she went on to manage KS3 and GCSE English language and literature, as well as leading the Sixth Form curriculum. During this time, Sam trained as an examiner in AQA and iGCSE and has marked GCSE English examinations across a range of specifications. She went on to tutor Business English, English as a Second Language and international GCSE English to students around the world, as well as tutoring A level, GCSE and KS3 students for educational provisions in England. Sam freelances as a ghostwriter on novels, business articles and reports, academic resources and non-fiction books.
The Road to Nail-biting Narratives...
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Get them started on the lesson below and then jump into our teacher-created activities to practice what they've learnt. We've recommended five to ensure they feel secure in their knowledge - 5-a-day helps keeps the learning loss at bay (or so we think!).
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Now...onto the lesson!
Follow our step-by-step guide to help your child improve their creative writing into a nail-biting narrative that will impress even the most critical examiner!
A piece of writing is just that isn’t it? When did you last have to think about not only writing a detailed description but also using a variety of sentence types, a plethora of fancy words and include punchy punctuation to show that you actually know how to use an apostrophe?
It can seem like you are being the harshest of critics when your child has laboured over a piece of writing and then you tell them to go away and make some improvements. I know, I know - this then is often followed by an onslaught of eye-rolling, tutting and the occasional mini-meltdown (did I mention door slamming?) It's totally understandable when your child has laboured over a piece of creative writing, but, nonetheless, painstaking for every parent!
So, let’s make this easier for you. Your EdPlace team have put together an article which aims to make the art of crafting a normality in the process of revising those all-important creative writing questions that your child needs to master.
We’re confident that by the end of this article your child will be able to:
1) Understand accurate punctuation, sentence structure variety and impressive vocabulary
2) Develop their creative writing
3) Explain how the y can make positive alterations which help with improved grades
We’re not going to confuse matters by asking your child to use every punctuation mark known to man – let’s take a simplistic approach. We're going to concentrate on 5 main punctuation marks and understanding how to use them correctly:
1) Full stops : used at the end of a sentence (make sure a capital letter follows this also)
2) Commas : used in complex sentences (more on this later) or in a list – if you can, try to include a list in your writing, then it will have ticked the ‘comma’ box
3) Apostrophes : used for contractions e.g. can’t/didn’t (avoid using these for formal writing) or to indicate possession e.g. the tree’s branches
4) Speech marks : used for direct speech e.g. the witch screamed, “I’ll get you my pretty!”
5) Ellipsis : used to add a cliff-hanger e.g. cautiously, the children peered round the old, creaky door…)
There are four main sentence types. Examiners are like bloodhounds sniffing out the trail from the humble ‘minor’ sentence to the godfather of all sentence structure archetypes – the ‘complex sentence.’ Examiners love to see students demonstrating their knowledge of how to use these four grammatical beauties in their creative writing, and will reward students for their efforts.
1) Minor : ‘Marley was dead.’ (Often used for short, snappy introductions and to emphasise a dramatic event.)
2) Simple : ‘The door to the old counting-house was propped open.’ (has a subject – ‘the door’ and tells us what is happening to the door ‘was propped open’)
3) Compound : ‘The door to the old counting-house was propped open, and Bob Cratchit was working hard at his desk.’ (a simple sentence connected to another simple sentence)
4) Complex : ‘ Because Scrooge wanted to keep an eye upon Bob , the door to the old counting-house was propped open.’ (a subordinate clause forms part of the sentence supported by the main clause – the comma is used to separate the two parts.)
To put it simply…fancy words. Have your child think of some synonyms (words that have a similar meaning) or connotations (words that make you think of other words/ideas) to make their writing a little more unusual and interesting.
For instance: ‘ The large dog barked at the boy .’
Fancy words added: ‘ The gigantic hound growled at the petrified and innocent child .’
Which is more exciting? More importantly, which would most impress your examiner?
What type of sentence?
1) Although she was tired, Amy carried on revising for her exams.
2) I’m starving!
3) The exam was difficult, but the students smashed it!
4) Miss Honey was proud of her class.
Punctuate the following passage:
the teachers pen fell onto the floor adam picked it up and ink exploded all over his face george shouted blues definitely not your colour adam the headteacher walked in and the whole class fell silent
Re-write the sentences to make them more ‘fancy':
1) The tiger walked through the jungle.
2) The wind blew through the trees.
3) Some animals at the zoo are dangerous.
We hope your child is feeling more confident about producing their own impressive creative writing! If so, now is the perfect time for you to put them to the test. Here are some activities which will help to consolidate their learning. We recommend doing them in this order so that their learning builds progressively.
All activities are created by teachers and automatically marked. Plus, with an EdPlace subscription, we can automatically progress your child at a level that's right for them. Sending you progress reports along the way so you can track and measure progress, together - brilliant!
Activity 1 - Check Your Writing Skills 1
Activity 2 - Check Your Writing Skills 2
Activity 3 - Emotive Language
Activity 4 - Use Persuasive Techniques and Rhetorical Devices
Activity 5 - Writing to Describe: A Street Scene
1) Complex 2) Minor 3) Compound 4) Simple
T he teacher’s pen fell onto the floor. A dam picked it up , and ink exploded all over his face . G eorge shouted , “Blue’s definitely not your colour A dam !” T he headteacher walked in , and the whole class fell silent …
Examples of possible answers:
1) Silently, the hungry, tiger prowled the lustrous jungle searching for its next unsuspecting victim.
2) The warm, gentle breeze rustled through the soft green leaves making them dance in the sunlight.
3) Several fierce creatures at the wildlife zoo are deadly!
Click the button below to view the edplace english, maths, science and 11+ activity library.
All English, maths and science from Year 1 - GCSE
WRITTEN BY: Ms Scaife – ENGLISH TEACHER
Year 6 students pupils should be taught to multiply and divide numbers by 10, 100 and 1,000 giving a…
In year 4, students should be able to identify the part played by evaporation and condensation in th…
In year 4, students should be able to to use determiners correctly and to identify them within a sen…
Year 6 pupils should be able to use modal verbs or adverbs to indicate degrees of possibility.
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking you through all the ways that you can improve your narrative writing for GCSE. Since it’s a universal task across all the exam boards and since it’s a high-stakes skill carrying a lot of marks, it’s worth spending some time to get it right.
Today we look at punctuation. It’s something I’ve covered in a lot of depth, having looked at ways to use all kinds of punctuation marks across the two writing tasks. Today, we look specifically at punctuation in narrative writing and how it can be used to tell a story.
One of the most depressing things to see as I open a piece of writing is a list like this:
.,?!:;…-“”()
All it tells me is that I’m about to read something that is written as a vehicle to get in a load of punctuation marks because that’s how the candidate feels marks are awarded.
The more you use, the more marks you get, right?
This comes back to my previous post about vocabulary, and how the chief examiner for AQA used that term ‘contrived’. All contrived means in this sense is artificial, used deliberately in an unrealistic way rather than appearing spontaneously. Punctuation often suffers the same fate as linguistic devices: because it can be reduced to a mnemonic of sorts, students go into the exam, slap down a checklist and tick each one off as they go.
Yet writing like this never gets high marks.
What readers are looking for is the right mark in the right place.
I’m looking for candidates who understand that punctuation can be as much a part of the story as the words themselves. They control the pace, the musicality, the style. They speed things up. And then, when you are in desperate need of taking a while, in need of lingering a little to allow your reader to catch their breath, your punctuation and the structure of your sentence do all the heavy lifting, stretching the sentence out in order to delay, to deliberate, to pontificate.
It’s not about using ALL the punctuation.
Nor is it even about using all the punctuation correctly.
It’s about using punctuation for deliberate narrative effect.
Punctuation, after all, is not just some add-on. It’s not an after-thought. It is – or, at least, it should be – an integral part of your writing.
Here are five ways you can use punctuation more effectively in your narratives, using them to tell a story.
Are you trying to go for a tense mood? A terse narrative style? Or are you planning on waxing lyrical and releasing your inner poet as you uncover a moment of beauty within the story? Are you in need of making something startling and striking?
Are you trying to slow your reader down or speed them up?
Before you even start to write, it’s a good idea to consider whether you want it to be fast or slow, at the very least.
Of course, with punctuation, it’s hardly as if you can map out your entire story before you start, but even in the planning stages, you can include some notes for yourself. Think of your plan almost as a musical conductor’s notes. Do you want it to be adagio or allegro ? Slow or bright? Are you building to a crescendo or a cliffhanger?
Punctuation is all about mood.
In Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, she creates many scenes of suspense and tension. Look at the terse, tense, sharp, staccato sentences here:
I wake to darkness and dead cold.
In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be – and yet it is. I am awake and I see it, it is real. Through the doorway I see it. It is standing in the main room looking out of the north window. It’s inside.
Now it’s turning towards me. I feel its rage. Its malevolence crushes me to my bunk.
I fumble for my torch. Can’t find it. Can’t get untangled from the sleeping bag. I knock over the chair besides me. Glass shatters. A stink of paraffin.
Here, there is a tense and dischordant mood. Paver is not just using punctuation to create that mood. Her vocabulary and her sentences also help create that effect. All things come together.
I have no idea if Paver made a very conscious decision with her punctuation. It can become very instinctive to good writers, because they don’t even think about the effect. Yet before she wrote, she knew no doubt that she was building up to the final crescendo. The three tools that she has in her toolkit – punctuation, sentences and vocabulary – all create both the mood and the pace.
Before you commit your next sentence to paper having just written the last, it’s useful to think about whether you need to go fast or slow, at the very least.
If there’s one skill that makes a huge difference, it’s knowing where and how to use full stops and commas. As you can see from the passage above, these are really the most frequent of the punctuation you will use. A good writer can arguably get by with nothing other than full stops, commas and the occasional apostrophe. In his book The Road , Cormac McCarthy uses little other than full stops and apostrophes as you can see in the opening here:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
It’s worthwhile focusing on the components of a sentence and understanding where and when to use a sentence fragment, and for what purpose. You can’t divorce punctuation from sentences and structures. Both Paver and McCarthy use very little other than full stops, and both use fragments, but they feel right.
I know that must seem like a strange thing to say about sentences, that they ‘feel’ right, but the real truth is that there are no hard and fast rules about where fragments are to be used and where they are not.
We’ve considered the use of dialogue in narrative in another post. The good thing about dialogue is that speech punctuation and the punctuation of reporting clauses is either/or. That’s to say it’s either right or it’s not. There are few moments of punctuation like that. For instance, in copying out both Paver’s and McCarthy’s examples, there were places I would have put a comma. In fact, I put commas in and had to delete them – it was instinctive and habitual. That’s not to say I’m right and they’re wrong, but that there are few hard and fast rules about commas.
Speech punctuation is either right or wrong. On the whole. It gives the examiner or the reader a chance to see that you can master stuff where there are rules. In fact, whether someone knows how to punctuate speech is a real barometer for me about their skills.
We already know that speech serves many narrative purposes, so it’s something that can easily go in to your essay.
You may notice before that I said that speech punctuation is either right or wrong on the whole. McCarthy’s book is a very good example of how we can punctuate speech differently. Did you know, for instance, in French, that they use angled quote marks and dashes to introduce speech? « » takes the place of “”, and a dash is often used to introduce a speaker too.
– Stay where you are! Do nothing! Don’t make a move.
That can work in English too, and you’ll find writers using a dash to mark new speech – and no speech marks at all! How frightful is that?!
German speech marks look like this: „…“, as do a whole host of other languages.
Even in English, there are times when rules are broken, particularly by certain writers for effect. Consider McCarthy’s speech here:
The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I’m right here.
Does that mean McCarthy would fail his GCSE English Language? Well, the speech is clear and it’s also spartan for effect, so… I’d argue that it’s highly effective. Would I experiment in the exam? Perhaps not. There are times to play it safe just so that the examiner realises you are capable of following the rules. It’s not always obvious that students are breaking rules especially when there are many others who simply don’t know the rules yet.
With most stories, once you’ve got your full stops and commas right, you may find that you don’t actually need a much wider range of punctuation. One thing that even McCarthy needs, however, is an apostrophe in he’d . Like speech marks, both the omissive and the possessive apostrophe are either right or they’re wrong, so it’s worth brushing up on them. The real tell-tale for me is whether a student knows that its means ‘belonging to it’ and it’s means ‘it is’ or ‘it has’. Students who know this rule don’t make that mistake. I was 24 years old and I’d got through GCSEs, A level English Literature and a degree in English Literature before my uncle pulled me up on this error. I know plenty of people whose intelligence and writing I esteem and who haven’t quite got the it’s/its thing right yet…
Hyphens are the other one that are almost either/or. There is some changing shifts as cultures change and words like ward-robe morph into wardrobe and people forget there was ever a hyphen there. Even McCarthy in his punctuation-bare novel uses a hyphen from time to time, half-inch even when he runs others together like oilbottles and trashdrum which you’d probably think of as two separate and distinct words that don’t even need a hyphen. So, again, not hard-and-fast rules, but more-or-less rules. Even if I don’t find speech in a story – perfectly normal in a one-character story, by the way – then full stops, commas, apostrophes and hyphens tend to be the normal, reliable features of narratives.
Punctuation has meaning. Dashes speak to haste and disruption, chaos and interruption. Colons tell us that explanation will follow; semi-colons tell us that the idea is connected inextricably to ideas in the sentence just before. Ellipsis allow things to drift…
A well-chosen dash, colon, semi-colon or use of ellipsis can be very evocative, telling a tale in itself.
Think about that first sentence from Dark Matter by Michelle Paver:
In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be – and yet it is . That dash does a lot of story-telling. It shows that disconnect, that jarring hiatus between the narrator realising that what they are seeing is not possible, and yet it exists anyway. Dashes interrupt and suspend the sentence momentarily. Think about how it would inform someone reading the sentence aloud:
In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be [pause for dramatic effect] and yet it is
It tells that story of the writer’s internal state of mind, having to reconcile the possible and the impossible and struggling to do so.
Semi-colons are not just for lists. Please, please don’t put a shopping list into your story just to show you can use colons and semi-colons. All it shows is that you have no idea what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Here’s a beautiful example from Joseph Conrad:
Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness mysterious and invincible; the darkess scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.
Here, the semi-colons are used to build this sentence where the ideas connect one to the next and where they are layered upon one another. The semi-colons allow the ideas to connect, so they are not disrupted in the same way that a full stop or a dash would do. At the same time, they give more structure and shape to the sentence, pegging down those clauses rather than letting them float about like commas would do.
When it comes to your punctuation, then, you need to do more than simply showing competence and that you can use punctuation in the right place. Better candidates are beginning to play around with sentences, to shape them and to use punctuation to marshall the words within them. In other words, the best candidates are using punctuation purposefully rather than just planting it thoughtlessly.
In the next post we’ll build on what we have here and we’ll look at how writers use punctuation for effect.
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Subject: English
Age range: 14-16
Resource type: Other
Last updated
26 August 2024
Unlock the secrets of top-tier creative writing with this comprehensive digital file tailored for GCSE/IGCSE English Language students. This sample answer provides a captivating description of a mysterious place, designed to inspire students and demonstrate key techniques needed to excel. Discover how vivid imagery, sensory details and literary devices can transform a piece of writing into an engaging and memorable narrative.
What is this Sample Answer About?
This sample answer, crafted in response to the question, “Write a description of a mysterious place,” showcases an immersive and enigmatic setting filled with intrigue. The writing features a variety of language techniques, including metaphor, personification and rich descriptive language, making it an ideal learning tool for students.
Benefits for Educators and Pupils:
Essential for Exam Preparation:
These pages are crucial for students preparing for GCSE/IGCSE exams, offering clear examples of how to write effectively under timed conditions. By studying this sample answer, students can understand the expectations of examiners and learn how to structure their own responses to achieve top marks.
Equip your students with the tools they need to succeed. Invest in this digital file sample to unlock their full creative potential and ensure they approach their exams with confidence. Purchase now to provide a clear path to high achievement!
CONTAINS: 6 PAGES
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