One of the most common reasons a good writer loses marks in an 11 Plus paper has nothing to do with vocabulary or spelling. They wrote a story when the question asked for a description, or the other way round.
They are different tasks, and they are marked for different things. Here is how to tell them apart, and how to shape each one.
Start with the words in the question
Story signals: “write a story”, “continue the story”, “what happened next”, or a title such as The Door or The Last Day.
Description signals: “describe”, “a place”, “a moment”, “bring the scene to life”, or “what you can see, hear and feel”.
Picture prompts can go either way, so read the words under the picture carefully before deciding.
What a description needs
A description is not a story with the plot taken out. It has its own shape.
- Zoom. Start wide and move closer, or start on one small detail and pull back
- Senses. More than sight. Sound, smell, touch and temperature do a lot of the work
- Change. The best descriptions show time passing: light fading, rain starting, a crowd thinning out
There is little or no dialogue, and no big plot twist.
What a story needs
A story needs a character who wants something, a problem that gets in the way, and a change by the end. Description still matters, but it serves the plot rather than replacing it.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most common version is a description that turns into an adventure halfway through, because the child got bored of describing. The second is a story so busy with events that there is no room left for detail.
Both are fixable. Give your child the same prompt twice, once as a description and once as a story, then read the two side by side together. The difference becomes obvious very quickly.
Where to start
To see how strong pieces handle this, have a look at our examples post. And the routine in how to plan an 11 Plus story in five minutes works for descriptions too: decide where the piece ends, choose three moments and build a small word bank before writing.
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