Everything Exams

Great literature always contains great sentence starters – often surprising the reader, sometimes drawing on their heartstrings from the first word, but always encouraging them to turn the next page.

When helping students with exam preparation for independent school entrance assessments at 11 plus and 13 plus, I like to see the same in any creative writing piece – a clear demonstration of a student’s writing skills in the form of a variety of sentence starters. These can show an examiner just how good a student’s understanding of English grammar is by the sentence structure they employ plus, learning to use them can improve a student’s writing style. Adding a few excellent examples of interesting sentence starters can increase the quality of a piece of writing leading to an improved grade. Lots of practice is needed but the rewards are there for those who put the effort in.

Of course, students must remember to also include key elements such as a clear structure to hold their creative writing piece together, a variety of literary devices used as well as a selection of writing devices and writing techniques, and some higher level punctuation on top of the usual capital letters and full stops. 

Here though, I would like to share with you some of my favourite sentence starter ideas for this level of creative piece. Since the writing part of an 11 plus entrance exam in a typical private school usually lasts between 25-30 minutes, planning time is limited. The benefit of learning how to use these particular sentence starters is that they can be quickly pulled out of the bag in a time pressured situation, to move a story forward in an interesting way.

So, here we go, my top 3 techniques:

Adjective/s + Nouns

This is where you begin your sentence with some really creative vocabulary, painting a vivid picture of your scene. One, two or even three adjectives or adjective phrases work, and if you use three, it shows you have an appreciation of the Rule of Three too!

You sometimes need to use a little imagination when choosing the verb for these – ‘hung’, ‘covered’ and ‘held’ are in the examples here.

This takes the form: Adjective/s/Adjective phrases + Noun + Finish Sentence

Long, white cobwebs hung from the ceiling of the crypt like fingers reaching down towards my face.

Think carefully about the order you put your adjectives or adjective phrases in for maximum impact.

You could place them in size order – Smooth, dark grey, rough-hewn slate tiles covered the entire floor.

You could also think about building up the emotion with your adjectives too – The quiet, disappointed, and incredibly vulnerable child held his head in his hands.

In the previous example, ‘quiet’ is mild, ‘disappointed ‘ is a little stronger and ‘incredibly vulnerable’ pulls on our heart strings, building up this melancholy scene.

This form of sentence starter is extremely useful at the beginning of a creative writing piece. You open the exam paper, come up with a rough plan but have no idea where to start. Use these types of sentence straight away to describe the setting for your characters, painting a picture for your readers to help them see your vision.

Participle Phrases

This takes the form: Participle Phrase + Comma + Main Sentence

This is where you start your sentence with a verb ending in “ing”. The ‘ing’ verb is in gerund form and is a participle phrase. The really important thing to remember here is that what is happening at the beginning of the sentence must happen at the same time as what is happening at the end.

Sitting all alone on the step, the girl began to cry.

The girl can sit and cry at the same time ✅

Crouching down in the long grass, Monty the cat waited for the little mouse to come out of his hole.

Monty can crouch at the same time as wait ✅

Walking as fast as he could, the boy ran through the shop door, just before closing time!

The boy cannot walk and run at the same time ❌

If you are stuck in your creative writing exam and don’t know how to proceed, think about what your character is doing. Perhaps, in your creative writing task, they are about to enter a haunted mansion so they might be creeping forward, tiptoeing quietly, or opening a wooden door…These could all be the beginning of great participle phrase sentence starters.

Fronted Adverbials

These sound super fancy but are really just extra pieces of information tagged on to the beginning of a sentence to help describe an aspect of the action in that sentence.

They take the form: 

Fronted Adverbial/Adverbial Phrase + Comma + Main Sentence

Fronted adverbials can help us understand something about the time the action occurred in our sentence (In the blink of an eye, the dog had ripped the turkey right out of Mum’s hands.), the manner in which it was done (Angrily, Emily stormed out of the room), how often the action occurs (Once or twice, I heard a strange scratching noise coming from the basement), where the action takes place (Inside the box, I could see what I had been looking for all along) and adverbials which suggest the possibility of something being the case – maybe, undoubtedly, definitely, clearly, perhaps – (Decidedly flustered, the professor began to stutter.)

After an unfortunate incident has occurred, my personal favourite fronted adverbials are:

In a moment of panic, …

Without a second to lose, …

Without thinking, …

Luckily, …

I do hope you have found this useful. Check this out for more techniques children can use to improve their creative writing.