Recommended Reading
English for 11+: Composition
Tips for pupils:
- Firstly, breathe! This isn’t a race. It’s much better to take your time and write in an interesting, accurate way, than to get down all your thoughts at the expense of grammar, punctuation and vocabulary.
- Take a couple of minutes to think through what you are going to write, and if it helps you, write down a couple of words to help remind you of this outline as you write.
Know your mark scheme. There will be marks for content, as well as organising your writing well; using varied vocabulary; and grammar, punctuation and spelling. Take a second to remind yourself of this so that you can give the examiner what they are looking for – they want to give you marks!
Now for the writing part:
- Use varied ways of starting sentences to grab the reader’s interest. “Whispering quietly, he told me...”, is much more interesting than, “He said...”.
- Replace common words with more interesting ones. For example, “walked” can become “strode”, “hobbled”, or “staggered”.
- If you are writing a story, remember to begin to develop the plot, setting and characters.
Plot: something interesting needs to happen, or begin to happen, to get the attention of the person reading your story.
Setting: tell the reader about where your story is taking place. Use descriptive words (adjectives) to create a sense of atmosphere. Is it dark, cold, scary, colourful?
Characters: the reader wants to know what kind of person is involved; otherwise it’s difficult to care about them. Tell us about their appearance, and their thoughts and feelings.
When you have finished writing:
- Leave a couple of minutes to check over your work. Firstly, look for spelling and punctuation mistakes, as they will cost you marks. Then check for places where you could insert a more interesting word or phrase to gain you extra marks.
- Tell yourself well done!
