Rather helpfully, exam boards release examiner reports every year, detailing the features of student responses that gained top marks.

The following comments have been lifted from AQA examiner reports:

What does ‘consciously crafted’ and ‘controlled’ mean? Well first off, it implies that the student plans their story, or image description very carefully. In the exam itself, there is only about five minutes to do this. However, by the time they take their exam, students should have had hours of practice in effective planning strategies, so that careful planning has become automatic, and speedy. Here’s an example of a planning strategy that I use on my course for picture descriptions.

And another I use for stories.

The important thing for a student to understand is that they have to limit the scope of their story. The lowest scoring responses tend to be rambling stories that cover ambitious plot lines. The trouble is, in 45 minutes, this approach amounts to a dull list of plot events, and next to no description. Description is important as it allows the student to use ‘extensive and ambitious vocabulary’, and to pair this with ‘crafting of linguistic devices’.

One way of limiting a story’s scope is to encourage a student to choose a short clip from a film and to reduce the action down to seven bullet points. Each bullet point then becomes a paragraph. Originality of plot line is not awarded any marks by the exam boards, so it really doesn’t matter if a candidate bases their story on a moment from a well known film. I teach students how to do this on my course.

Occasionally, I have students who prioritise quality over quantity. The following example satisfies many of the success criteria in just a single paragraph. Job done, I hear you cry!

Well, no, because of the second bullet point highlighted above. The idea of having the creative writing question directly after the reading questions is that students are supposed to learn how to structure through analysis, and then apply it to their own writing. The transfer of this skill from active to passive is rarely automatic, I find.

Students need to be taught how to use ‘fluently linked paragraphs’. Modelling examples is one way of doing this, as I do here.

Equally, it can sometimes be powerful to use a student’s original paragraph, and expand it into a fuller, more structured version, giving tips on how to do this. As I’ve done here, when I fed back to the student.

So, the message to take away from this blog? Less is more. Students should definitely prioritize quality over quantity.

A high quality piece isn’t just crammed with sophisticated language and devices. It is also structured beautifully, with seamlessly linked paragraphs, which takes the reader on a compelling journey.

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