Write an original short story that begins with the words: "The day started off well enough, whoever thought it would ..."

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 380 words)

THE DAY OF THE ELECTION

The day started off well enough, whoever thought it would end with the Head Boy election being cancelled and my closest friend refusing to speak to me for a month.

Anirban and I had both been nominated. This had seemed funny in October, when the nominations went up and we shook hands in the corridor like politicians on television, and rather less funny by February, when it became clear that one of us was going to lose in front of nine hundred people.

The voting was on a Tuesday. By the first break the school had divided itself into camps in the way schools do, and somebody had written both our names on the blackboard of Class Nine-B with a tally beneath.

What happened next I still do not entirely understand.

At lunch a boy from our section came to me and said that people were saying Anirban had been caught copying in the December Chemistry test and had been let off because his father knew the Principal. It was not true. I knew it was not true, because I had sat two desks from him and because his father has never met the Principal in his life.

I said, "That is rubbish." Then I said nothing else, and I walked away, and I did not go and find the four people who were repeating it.

By two o’clock it was everywhere. By half past two Mrs. Sen had heard it. At three the Vice Principal cancelled the voting, announced an enquiry, and told the whole assembly that a rumour had been circulated against a candidate.

Anirban found me at the gate. He did not shout. He asked me one question — whether I had heard it before lunch was over — and I said yes, and he nodded once and got on his bus.

The enquiry cleared him in four days. The election was held again in March and he won it, which I was glad about, and which I told him at the time and which he did not answer.

We are all right now. It took until the following winter.

What I have never been able to explain to anybody, including myself, is that I did not do anything wrong that day. I simply did not do anything at all, and I have learnt that those are not the same thing.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The OPENING IS GIVEN and must be reproduced EXACTLY as your first words, including the trailing "would". Paraphrasing it loses content marks before you have written anything of your own.

Note how much the given line hands you. "Whoever thought it would" promises that something went badly wrong, so the reader is already waiting for it — your job is to complete the sentence in a way that is worth waiting for. Complete it in the FIRST sentence, as the model does; a story that takes three paragraphs to reveal what went wrong wastes the gift.

AVOID the rehearsed disasters: the picnic that ends in an accident, the trip that ends in a hospital. They are written by most candidates and are hard to end without melodrama. A social or moral disaster is fresher and allows a better ending.

THE ENDING decides this type. Show what the day CHANGED. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.