What The craft of writing asks of you in the 2024 English syllabuses

Model answer.

• Imaginative: invented worlds, characters or moments (stories, scenes, monologues).
• Discursive: thoughtful exploration of an idea, often reflective in tone, such as an essay or personal essay.
• Persuasive: writing designed to move a reader to a view or action, such as a speech or editorial.
• Reflective: writing that looks back on or thinks about experience and its meaning.

Marking spine.

• 1 mark: three or four types named correctly.
• 1 mark: accurate descriptions.
• 1 mark: clear, plain expression.

Note. The 2017 Advanced specification also listed 'informative'. The new Advanced and Standard specifications list imaginative, discursive, persuasive and/or reflective.

Model answer. 'Dev folded his résumé into a smaller and smaller square. The waiting room clock had a tick he could feel in his teeth. When his name was called, he stood too quickly and had to steady himself against the chair.'

Marking spine.

• 1 mark: nervousness is not named directly.
• 2 marks: concrete detail and action carry the feeling (the folding, the clock, the unsteady standing).
• 1 mark: controlled, varied sentences.

Model answer. The opening announces the topic instead of engaging the audience, so it wastes the most attentive moment of the speech. A stronger opening starts with something that creates interest or tension. For example: 'Every classroom in this school has twenty-five students and twenty-five screens, and the screens are winning. If we do not decide who is in charge, they will decide for us.'

Marking spine. 2 marks for explaining the weakness (announcing, not engaging); 2 for a stronger opening with a hook; 2 for a clear audience, voice and stance in the new opening.

Model paragraph. 'For two years I told people I hated the beach. The sand got into everything and the sun made me feel like a piece of toast. Then last summer my grandfather asked me to walk the length of Bondi at dawn, and I went only because he had walked slower each year. The sand was cold. The gulls had the place to themselves. By the time we reached the rocks I had stopped checking my phone, and it did not seem to matter that I had stopped. It was not the beach I had changed my mind about.'

Marking spine. 2 marks for specific, concrete detail; 2 for voice and control of tone; 2 for avoiding the banned phrases while still showing change; 2 for a closing idea that is implied, not announced.

How a strong response is shaped.

1. Decide the form and why. A short story, a reflective essay, a speech or a hybrid. Choose the form in which you can show control quickly, and keep it consistent.
2. Treat 'threshold' flexibly. It can be a doorway, an age, a decision, a border, a moment before something changes. Original, specific interpretations outscore predictable ones.
3. Open with a moment, not a summary. Begin close to the turning point.
4. Control voice. Choose a narrator or speaker and keep the register consistent unless a change is deliberate.
5. Use craft choices on purpose. Imagery, structure (for example, a repeated phrase or a shifting timeline), sentence rhythm, and a precise ending.
6. Edit. Leave five minutes to cut padding and check for clichés.

Model excerpt (opening of an original short story, about 170 words).

The ferry doors stayed shut for eleven seconds longer than usual, and in those seconds Mira decided not to get off. Everyone else shuffled forward anyway, a slow tide of backpacks and umbrellas, and she let it pass around her like water around a rock. On the wharf her mother would be standing with the car keys, rehearsing the speech about the new school, the new house, the new beginning that she had been promising all summer.

Mira studied the strip of grey harbour through the gap in the doors. It looked no different from the harbour she had crossed that morning, but she had the strange feeling that it had been quietly rearranged while she wasn't watching. The seat beside her still held the shape of a stranger who had left. She put her palm in the hollow. It was warm, and that was somehow the worst part: a whole life, and then a warmth, and then nothing.

The doors opened. She stood.

Why it works: it opens on a moment, not a summary; the voice is steady; the threshold is a doorway, a decision and a change of life at once, and the final short sentences leave the choice unexplained.

Marking spine (20). About 7 for ideas and originality of treatment; 7 for control of language, voice, and form; 3 for structure and cohesion; 3 for accuracy and polish. Pieces that explain their own meaning outright, rely on stock plots, or run out of time before the ending are usually held in the middle bands.

What this tests. NESA's specification says The craft of writing may be set in two parts, and the Advanced sample paper has exactly this shape: a 10-mark composition followed by a 10-mark evaluation of your own language choices. The two parts are linked, so choose an emotion in part (a) that you can explain in part (b).

Part (a): plan (about 20 minutes).

• Decide the emotion before you write (quiet dread, relief, tenderness, shame) and the form (a scene continuing in the same voice is fastest).
• Keep the stimulus's close, precise voice. Continue from the moment rather than summarising what came before.
• Choose two or three devices to use on purpose (a repeated object, a shift in sentence length, a concrete sensory detail) so that part (b) has something real to evaluate.

Part (a): model continuation (about 110 words)

The number stayed the same. Four dollars and thirty cents, and the vending machine across the tracks hummed as if it knew. She tried the phone again. Her mother's name sat on the screen like a held breath, and she did not press it, because pressing it meant saying where she was, and saying where she was meant saying why. A gust pushed an empty chip packet along the yellow line. She watched it all the way to the end of the platform, then looked back at the coins, and for the first time since the train left she let herself count them slowly, as if slowness could make them enough.

Part (b): model paragraph (about 120 words)

I wanted the reader to feel a quiet, protective ache for a girl who is too proud to ask for help. I opened by repeating the counting of the coins, which echoes the stimulus and makes the reader share her small, hopeless arithmetic. The simile of the mother's name as 'a held breath' turns the phone into a source of tension, so the reader is made to wait with her. Short declarative sentences ('The number stayed the same') produce a flat, defeated rhythm, while the final long sentence slows her counting down, and the phrase 'as if slowness could make them enough' lets the reader see her hope without my stating it. Withholding the reason for her situation was deliberate: it keeps the emotion focused on her dignity.

Marking spine (20)

Part (a), 10 marks: about 4 for ideas and effect on the reader; 4 for control of language, voice and form; 2 for structure and accuracy. Part (b), 10 marks: about 4 for a clear statement of the intended emotional response; 4 for specific evaluation of language choices quoted from your own piece (what each does and how well it works); 2 for clear, controlled expression. A part (b) that only lists techniques, or that praises the piece without pointing to its words, stays in the middle bands. The Standard sample paper instead used a single reflective piece based on a stimulus, so practise both shapes.