You walk home from school one afternoon to find the door unlocked and on entering you are shocked to see the house in total disarray. You call out but get no answer. Describe in detail what you saw, the reason behind your house being in total disarray and how you found your family. Mention also how the experience ended and what impact it had on your life.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 390 words)

THE AFTERNOON THE HOUSE WAS OPEN

The door was standing three inches open, and my mother has not left a door unlocked in twenty years.

The front room had been taken apart. Both almirah doors were wide, and the clothes from the lower shelves were on the floor in heaps. The drawers of the writing table had been pulled out and stacked on the bed, one inside the other. There was a dusting of something white across the mat by the window, and it took me a long moment to work out that it was plaster. The clock had come off the wall and was lying face up, still going.

I called out twice. The second time my own voice frightened me.

Nothing answered except the fridge, which chose that moment to start its motor, and I have never been so glad to hear a machine.

The reason, when I found it, was in the bathroom, and it was not the reason I had spent ninety seconds imagining.

A pipe in the wall behind the cistern had given way at about one o’clock. The water had come through into the front room, and my grandmother — who is seventy-eight and was alone in the house — had begun pulling things off the lower shelves to save them, which is why the clothes were on the floor and the drawers on the bed. The plaster was from the wall the plumber had opened. She had left the front door on the latch for him and forgotten it.

They were all at the neighbours’ flat. My mother had come back from work, my grandmother was being given tea and being told she should have telephoned somebody, and the plumber’s boy was sitting on the stairs with a wrench.

It ended with a wet carpet, a bill for four thousand rupees and a fortnight of a hole in the bathroom wall.

What it left me with was something smaller and more permanent. For about two minutes in that front room I had believed something terrible had happened to my family, and the relief afterwards did not simply cancel the fear — it left a residue.

I telephone my grandmother from school now, on Wednesdays. She thinks it is because I am fond of her, and she is right, but it is not the whole reason.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

This is the most heavily prescribed composition in any of these papers. FOUR tasks are named, and content marks are counted against all four:

1. DESCRIBE IN DETAIL what you saw
2. THE REASON behind the disarray
3. HOW YOU FOUND YOUR FAMILY
4. HOW THE EXPERIENCE ENDED and WHAT IMPACT it had on your life

Budget your 400 words across all four before you begin. The commonest failure is 350 words of frightening description and two lines for everything else.

A STRATEGIC POINT on task 2. The instinctive reason is a burglary, and it is written by almost every candidate — it is also hard to end, because a burglary needs police, recovery and resolution you have no room for. A DOMESTIC explanation, as here, answers the question completely and leaves room for tasks 3 and 4.

The fourth task asks for IMPACT ON YOUR LIFE, so the composition must end with a lasting change, not merely with the problem solved. 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.