Essay wrting advice

Independent Schools as an alternative to Grammar

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inspired2win
Posts: 91
Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2009 2:23 pm

Essay wrting advice

Post by inspired2win »

Can someone kindly advice how is required when a 1 hour essay is given to write at an exam? How many A4 size pages should l expect my Ds to write in one hour?

Kindly advice.

Thanks
Inspired2win
FirstTimeBuyer
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Re: Essay wrting advice

Post by FirstTimeBuyer »

inspired2win wrote:Can someone kindly advice how is required when a 1 hour essay is given to write at an exam? How many A4 size pages should l expect my Ds to write in one hour?

Kindly advice.

Thanks
Inspired2win
In English, I assume.
What age group?
What context - English creative writing or History essay, ?
Holiday work, CE exam, scholarship exam...
More detail, please......
Exams are formidable for the best prepared. The greatest fool may ask what the wisest man cannot answer.
inspired2win
Posts: 91
Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2009 2:23 pm

Essay writng advice

Post by inspired2win »

Thanks for response, this is for 10+ exam, creative writing (Enlgish), essay topic given in exam. For an independent 10+ exam.

Thanks
FirstTimeBuyer
Posts: 271
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Location: S East

Re: Essay writng advice

Post by FirstTimeBuyer »

inspired2win wrote:Thanks for response, this is for 10+ exam, creative writing (Enlgish), essay topic given in exam. For an independent 10+ exam.

Thanks
I would suggest that DC spends 10 minutes planning it with a mindmap / spider diagram or whatever you want to call it (separate sheet of paper obviously).
In the remaining 50 minutes 2 A4 sheets (or circa 500 words) would be a target.
However I would suggest that quality is more important than quantity (any school setting a 10-year-old a one hour essay is clearly competitive), so emphasis on>
1. Layout - Title, paragraphs, introduction/conclusion
2. Use of adjectives with nouns (no nice or big or good - DC should learn a few favourites).
3. A few adverbs
4. try to work in a simile or two.
5. puntuation, spelling and grammar to recheck

My DS2 is 10, and benefits greatly from re-reading what he has written to fill in the omissions, punctuation etc. :!:

Best of Luck. :)
FTB
Exams are formidable for the best prepared. The greatest fool may ask what the wisest man cannot answer.
hamster
Posts: 54
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 9:51 pm

Post by hamster »

And don't do what my DD did which was to write all 3 essays rather than 1! Serves me right for sending her in cold without even looking at a practice paper although I did tell her to read the questions!

She complained that she was only given 2 sheets of paper as well so the three must have been very short!

I am laughing because, thank God, this was the back up school and not our first choice!

She is absolutely mortified though - she only realised a few days after the exam.
surreymum
Posts: 553
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:26 pm

Post by surreymum »

hamster wrote:And don't do what my DD did which was to write all 3 essays rather than 1! Serves me right for sending her in cold without even looking at a practice paper although I did tell her to read the questions!

She complained that she was only given 2 sheets of paper as well so the three must have been very short!

I am laughing because, thank God, this was the back up school and not our first choice!

She is absolutely mortified though - she only realised a few days after the exam.
I think quite a few schools make allowances for complete mess up by the kids in terms of understanding the question. One of my sons at one of the grammar school exams completely misunderstood the question and wrote his essay on entirely the wrong subject, but still passed with a reasonable mark so I assumed they must have docked a certain amount of marks for doing the wrong thing and then looked at the content of what he had written.

Needless to say I did have kittens until we got the results :D
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