Exam skills: Video playlist

In your English language exam, you’ll be asked to create a piece of narrative or descriptive writing. Narrative writing tells story. This could be made up by you or based on something you’ve experienced. Descriptive writing encourages the reader to imagine and empathise with an experience object or place. In both cases, you will need to demonstrate creative use of language and structure, while using accurate and varied punctuation, to convey original ideas through your writing.

Let’s look at some general strategies you can use for any creative writing task. Start with an interesting opening. This should place your reader in the action as soon as possible to grab their attention. You should avoid unnecessary and unexciting details or explanations. Throughout your piece, you should use a range of sentence and paragraph structures to vary the pace and an impact of your writing, and you should use accurate spelling and varied vocabulary and punctuation throughout.

Here are a few strategies for crafting a narrative piece. Keep it simple. There won’t be time to create a really complex story. One or two settings and one or two characters is enough. Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and an end to your story with a clear line of progress from one point in time at the beginning to another point in time at the end. Most stories and narratives are driven by a character dealing with conflict or challenges.

If your main character doesn’t have a problem to solve, the story will be less interesting to read. You should try and keep dialogue to a minimum and use it to help move the story forward or add emotion to your characters. A clear ending is also important. You could make sure that your character has dealt with the conflict or challenge you started your story with.

Here are a few strategies for a piece of descriptive writing. You can use language related to your senses - sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, to help immerse the readers in the experience you are describing. You can zoom in on particular details of the experience, focusing on small moments in detail. This will help build atmosphere, reveal character, or add depth to descriptions of objects and places. Using imagery such as personification, metaphor, or simile can help create powerful images in the mind of the reader.

Whether you choose to write a narrative or descriptive piece, you should use language, structure, and punctuation creatively to interest and engage your reader. Have fun.