Descriptive writing

Question 5 is the whole of Section B. You choose one of two tasks, usually:

• a description, often of a picture printed on the paper; or
• a story, or the opening of one, on a given idea.

It is worth 40 marks, a quarter of your English Language GCSE, and you should spend about 45 minutes on it:

• AO5 (24 marks): content and organisation. Is it interesting, well crafted and well structured?
• AO6 (16 marks): technical accuracy. Are your spelling, punctuation, sentences and vocabulary accurate and varied?

A description doesn't need a plot. It captures one place or one moment in rich detail, so the reader feels they are there.

• Use all five senses, not just sight: sounds, smells, textures, even taste.
• Move the focus like a camera: start wide, then zoom in on small details.
• Or show the same place changing: at dawn, then at midday, then at night.
• Give each paragraph a new focus, as if it were a new camera shot.
• Create a clear mood, such as calm, eerie or chaotic, and keep it consistent, or change it on purpose.

Write a description of a market as it closes for the night.

The last stallholder drags his shutter down with a shriek of metal, and the market begins to empty.

Rain has been falling since four. It beads on the striped awnings, gathers in the dips of the canvas and spills, without warning, onto the cobbles below. Puddles hold the orange glow of the streetlights like coins nobody has bothered to pick up.

Closer, beneath a trestle table, a crushed tomato bleeds into the gutter. A paper bag, swollen and soft, folds in on itself.

Then silence. Not true silence: the hum of a van's fridge, a pigeon shuffling along a ledge, the hiss of tyres two streets away. But the voices have gone, and the market, for the first time all day, can breathe.

Notice the zoom from market to tomato, and the minor sentence ‘Then silence.’

Choose the task you can do best, not the one that looks easiest.

• Choose the description if you can picture the scene clearly and enjoy detailed, crafted writing. There's no plot to manage, so you can focus on language.
• Choose the story if an idea comes to you straight away, with a character and a turning point.

Decide within a minute or two. Changing your mind halfway through wastes time you don't have.