HookWhy 'a lot happens' is the wrong instinct for the writing task
The most damaging piece of advice a Year 7 teacher ever gave was 'make sure lots happens in your story'. In the AQA writing task it is almost exactly backwards. Question 5 is worth forty marks — half of Paper 1 — and it offers you a choice: describe what a picture suggests, or write the opening of a story. AQA's examiner reports say the same thing every summer: the scripts that pile up car chases, kidnappings and last-minute twists tend to cluster in the middle bands, while the ones that slow right down and describe a single moment in crafted, controlled detail reach the top.
That is because the forty marks are not awarded for plot. They are split into twenty-four marks for AO5 — content and organisation, meaning how vividly and how coherently you write — and sixteen marks for AO6, technical accuracy: your punctuation, sentence variety, Standard English and spelling. Nobody is counting explosions. They are measuring the craft of your sentences and the shape of your piece. Once you know that, the visual prompt stops being a story to race through and becomes a moment to paint.
ModelDescription — paint one moment through the senses
If you pick the descriptive option you are usually given a photograph, and the winning strategy is to zoom in and slow down. Choose a small frame — a single street, a single window, a single face — and layer sensory detail so the reader is standing inside it. AQA rewards imagery, precise sensory detail and a controlled atmosphere, not a tour of everything in shot.
Use more than sight. Sound, smell, touch and temperature are what make description feel inhabited rather than photographed. A useful discipline is to write one sentence for each of three or four senses before you allow yourself an abstract statement about the mood.
An original demonstration of atmosphere built from the senses: 'Rain needled the tin roof of the bus shelter. The air tasted of wet iron and cold chips, and somewhere behind the hoardings a dog was barking itself hoarse. Under the one working light, a puddle shivered every time a lorry hissed past.' Notice there is no plot at all — nobody has done anything — yet the place exists, because touch (needled), taste (wet iron), sound (barking, hissed) and sight (the shivering puddle) have all been given a line. That is what a top-band description does before it worries about a story.
A model descriptive paragraph, annotated so you can see the choices: 'The pier had given up long ago. Its boards sagged like the keys of a broken piano, and between them the sea muttered to itself, grey and patient. Salt had eaten the railings down to a red lace of rust that flaked under my hand, cold as a coin left out overnight. Far off, a gull screamed once and thought better of it.' Watch the craft that earns AO5 marks: an extended metaphor (the pier as a broken piano) sustained rather than dropped; the sea muttered and was patient, personified into something almost sinister; a tactile simile (cold as a coin) that is precise, not decorative; and a final short sentence with a flicker of dark humour to control the mood. No event occurs, yet every sentence is doing deliberate work — that is the difference between describing a scene and merely listing what is in it.
ModelNarrative — shape a small moment, don't sprint through a plot
If you choose the story option, remember you are almost always writing an opening, not a whole plot. You do not have time to resolve a saga, and trying to caps most candidates in the middle. The scripts that score highest usually take a small, vivid moment — a single conversation, a single decision, a single arrival — and give it depth through voice, character and detail.
The famous six-word story often attributed to Ernest Hemingway — 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn' — is the teaching model here: the power is in what is implied, not in how much happens. Ernest Hemingway called this the iceberg principle: show a fraction, let the reader feel the mass beneath. Choose a distinctive narrative voice, drop the reader into the middle of something, and trust implication.
An original demonstration opening: 'Nan kept the good biscuits in the tin with the dented lid, and the fact that the tin was open on the table when I came in told me, before anyone said a word, that something had happened.' One sentence establishes a narrator, a relationship, a household and a foreboding — with no chase and no twist. That controlled, character-led opening will outscore three pages of action, because plot is not what AO5 measures; craft is.
MechanismRegister, style and ambitious vocabulary — precise, not purple
AO5 asks you to match register, tone and style to form, purpose and audience, and to reach for ambitious vocabulary and crafted linguistic devices for deliberate effect. The trap is 'purple prose': stacking up long, fancy words until the writing collapses under them. Ambitious vocabulary means the right word, not the longest — 'the light guttered' is more ambitious than 'the extremely bright light was slowly fading away'.
Craft your devices deliberately and sparingly. One well-placed extended metaphor, one moment of pathetic fallacy where the weather mirrors the mood, one deliberate piece of sibilance to slow a sentence down — each chosen because it does a job. A device the reader notices as a device has usually failed.
Compare two originals. Overwritten: 'The luminescent, resplendent orb of the celestial sun descended majestically beneath the distant, faraway horizon.' Controlled: 'The sun went down the way a bruise fades — slowly, and then all at once.' The second is shorter, uses plainer words, and lands a single precise simile. That is what examiners mean by ambitious: vocabulary and imagery in the service of effect, not vocabulary showing off.
MechanismOrganisation — structure the piece so a reader can follow it
Half of the AO5 marks are for organisation: structural features, purposeful paragraphing, discourse markers and connected ideas. A brilliant paragraph in a shapeless piece still caps in the middle band. Plan a shape before you write — even four bullet points — so the reader is led deliberately from opening to close.
Structural features you can plan on purpose: a cyclical structure that ends on the image it began with; a deliberate shift of focus from wide to narrow (or a flashback); a short, punchy final paragraph that resolves the mood. Paragraphs should be varied in length — a one-line paragraph, used rarely, can carry real weight. And discourse markers (later, meanwhile, even now, in the end) signal the movement of time and thought so the reader never gets lost.
An original demonstration of cyclical shaping: a description that opens 'The swing still turned, though no one had pushed it in years' and closes 'And still the swing turned, patient as ever, waiting for a hand that would not come' frames the whole piece and gives it a satisfying, engineered close. Examiners can see structure like that from across the room, and it is a reliable route into Level 4.
DataAO6 — sixteen marks hiding in your punctuation
Technical accuracy is forty per cent of the writing mark, and it is the most winnable — and losable — part of the task, because it rewards control you can practise rather than inspiration you have to hope for. AO6 covers three things: sentence demarcation and a range of punctuation; a variety of sentence forms with Standard English and grammatical control; and accurate spelling with ambitious vocabulary.
Demarcation first: every sentence must open with a capital and close with a full stop, and the comma splice — joining two full sentences with only a comma — is the single most common cap on AO6. To reach the top band you also need a range of punctuation used accurately: a colon to introduce, a semicolon to balance two linked ideas, a dash for an interruption, brackets for an aside. Not scattered everywhere — used where they belong.
Then sentence variety. Deliberately mix a long, layered complex sentence with a short, blunt simple one; open a sentence occasionally with a subordinate clause ('Although the tide was turning, she stayed'); use a minor sentence for effect. And spell your ambitious words right — a misspelled 'ambitious' word helps you less than a correctly spelled precise one. A quick original demonstration of controlled variety and punctuation: 'She waited. The bus did not come; the rain did. And somewhere — she was almost sure of it — a door had just clicked shut.' Full stop, semicolon, dash-pair and a minor sentence, all in three lines, all correct. That is what Level 4 AO6 reads like.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA marks the writing task on two ladders. AO5 (twenty-four marks) runs Level 1 'simple, limited' (1–6), Level 2 'some success' (7–12), Level 3 'consistent, clear' (13–18) and Level 4 'compelling, convincing' (19–24) — and 'convincing' is the key word: a top piece holds the reader without a wobble in control. AO6 (sixteen marks) runs Level 1 (1–4), Level 2 (5–8), Level 3 (9–12) and Level 4 (13–16), where the top band needs accurate demarcation, a genuine range of punctuation used correctly, varied sentence forms and mostly accurate spelling of ambitious words.
Because the two objectives are marked together on one piece, the practical route to the top is to write less but control all of it: a shorter piece with faultless punctuation and crafted imagery beats a longer one riddled with comma splices. Choose the descriptive option if plotting is your weakness — it removes the pressure to resolve a story.
Spend the first two or three minutes planning a shape and choosing your opening image; leave three or four minutes at the end to proofread specifically for demarcation and spelling, because those are the AO6 marks candidates lose without noticing. Examiner reports repeatedly praise scripts that 'sustain' an effect and criticise those that 'lose control' — so pick an atmosphere or voice on line one and hold it deliberately all the way to a planned final sentence.