Creative writing

Writing checklist

These three bands are the standards a primary school uses at the end of Year 6, so they are the same scale your child’s teacher marks against. “Working towards” is a stage on the way, not a verdict. Most children sitting the 11+ are somewhere in the middle band, and nobody reaches every statement in the third one inside a twenty-minute task.

Sit the writing paper

Four things that waste a good idea

Plan for the full five minutes. A piece that runs out of story halfway through loses more marks than a slow start costs.
Do not spend the first paragraph waking up and getting dressed. Start where something changes.
Do not end with it having been a dream. A marker reading two hundred pieces has seen it two hundred times.
Finish. An unfinished piece cannot show an ending, and the ending is one of the things being marked.

Working towards the expected standard

The things that have to be right before anything else counts. Check these first, every time.

Every sentence starts with a capital letter.
Every sentence ends with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark.
The writing is in paragraphs, and each paragraph holds one main idea.
Commas separate the items in a list.
Shortened words have an apostrophe where letters are missing: don’t, it’s, you’re.
Adjectives and adverbs describe the place and the people, not just the action.
Common words are spelled correctly, and anything unfamiliar has been checked.
The handwriting can be read by somebody who is not you.
There is a real opening and a real ending. The piece does not simply stop.

Working at the expected standard

What a marker is looking for in a piece that does the job well.

The writing knows who it is for, and the language suits them.
Atmosphere is built from the words chosen, not announced. Show the reader it is frightening rather than writing “it was scary”.
Speech is inside speech marks, holds only the exact words spoken, and tells us something about the speaker or moves the story on.
Adverbials say how, where or when, and some of them link one paragraph to the next.
Sentences begin in different ways, not all with the subject and not all with “Then”.
A range of conjunctions joins ideas: because, although, while, whereas, as a result.
The tense is the same all the way through, unless there is a reason for it to change.
Pronouns stand in for names, so the same noun is not repeated in every sentence.
Commas make the meaning clear, including between adjectives.
Colons, semi-colons, dashes and ellipses appear and are mostly used correctly.
Year 5 and 6 spellings are mostly right, and ambitious words have been attempted rather than avoided.
Proper nouns carry capital letters.

Working at greater depth

What separates a strong piece from a very strong one. Nobody does all of these in twenty minutes.

Apostrophes show possession as well as omission, including after a plural: the girls’ bags, the school’s books.
The level of formality shifts on purpose, and the vocabulary and sentence structure shift with it.
Sentence length varies for effect. A short one lands hardest after several long ones.
The vocabulary is precise rather than merely impressive: the exact word, not the longest one.
Characters reveal themselves through what they do and say, rather than being described to us.
The ending answers something the opening set up, so the piece feels finished rather than stopped.
The writing reads as though a person wrote it to be read, not as though a checklist was followed.

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