Everything Exams

A hefty proportion of my 11 plus tuition teaching time is spent helping candidates get up to speed with the creative writing section of entrance exams. I guess that mark schemes for maths, verbal and non verbal reasoning, and even comprehension tests are fairly straightforward for parents to interpret. When it comes to the writing component though, it’s quite often a different story…

Luckily, I love being an 11 plus creative writing tutor and I very much enjoy seeing how the writing styles and abilities of my students develop over time. I try to make sure that students are not coached for an exam but aquire life long skills which they can take with them into high school and beyond; components of a high scoring piece of 11 plus creative writing are the same as those found in a well written novel, top grade history paper, and professional copy online.

Not all schools have a creative writing section in the assessment process, but many do. Even if the first round of tests do not include a written part, such as with the London Consortium exams, the second round in individual schools might require candidates to demonstrate their writing abilities. Typical tasks might be to write a description, write a persuasive letter, or continue a story.

Before commencing tutoring, I always ask for a sample of a student’s work to assess where they stand. Many students have similar issues which can be easily fixed with, firstly, an understanding of what is required, followed by lots and lots of practice.

I usually find that teachers in schools have done a great job exposing students to different techniques they should use in their writing, but I’ve noticed that students haven’t completely realised that using these consistently in their own writing will bring up their grades and, most importantly, make their work more interesting. As mentioned above, and as an added bonus, all the techniques that help someone pass at 11 plus are also used by the best authors, website copywriters, and business people out there, so learning how to write well is a life skill too, not just something you work on to pass an exam.

I thought it might be useful to some of you out there, to make a list of things I like to see in students’ creative writing at this level:

• A very clear structure – in the 30 to 40 minutes you have available in the exams, 3 paragraphs would be fine with perhaps a mini paragraph to neatly finish the piece.
• A description or story that makes sense – are all relevant characters mentioned at the beginning? Does the narrative flow and is it easy to follow? For a description, does the description follow a logical path?
• Largely correct spelling and basic grammar – this kind of goes without saying, but, depending on the school or if you have some form of SEN which your prospective school is aware of, the odd spelling mistakes are ok, especially for ambitious words.
• A selection of higher level vocabulary – I would expect to see 5 or 6 great words scattered throughout a piece in a 30 minute test.
• Multiple examples of core literary devices – I like to see several examples of interesting and unusual metaphors, similes, and personification as well as a few uses of alliteration.
• A few examples of more unusual literary devices – I like to see a couple of examples of the rule of three being used, plus maybe one example of onomatopoeia – Bang!
• Several examples of higher quality punctuation – including at least one example of either a colon, semi colon or hyphens, correctly used, is good, plus perhaps one example of speech, again, perfectly punctuated. Be careful with speech though – try to use it only once or twice and avoid lots of dialogue.
• Fronted adverbials or adverbial phrases – it is far more interesting to read sentences beginning with fronted adverbials. Avoid ‘I did this…’ or ‘He did that…’ or ‘There was…’.
• Many other interesting sentences starters  – adjectives + noun works well when setting the scene – Long, white cobwebs hung from the ceiling like outstretched fingers… Participle phrases are great – Remembering all the important things I had to do that day, I quickly finished my blog post! 😅
• A neat final sentence, tying up the content – “I shall not be doing that again in a hurry,” he mused, before tucking himself under the covers and drifting off to sleep.

I hope this is useful for those of you out there preparing for an exam this autumn/winter. Perhaps, put together a checklist using the above points and use it to grade your own paper each time you practise?