Your school recently held a jubilee celebration. Write a letter to your friend who was unable to attend, giving details of the function and your role in it.

MODEL ANSWER

14, Lake View Road Kolkata 700029

29 February 2016

Dear Arjun,

You were badly missed, and I am under instructions from at least six people to tell you so. Here is the whole account, since you asked for it.

The golden jubilee was held on the 20th, on the main ground, and the school had been unrecognisable for a week beforehand — a stage at the far end, marigolds down both sides of the drive, and a hoarding over the gate with a photograph of the 1966 first batch, all eleven of them, in shorts.

The function ran from four to eight. There was a welcome address, then a documentary on the school’s fifty years which somebody had assembled from old photographs and which was much better than anyone expected. Four alumni spoke, including a man from the second batch who is eighty-one and who told a story about a Physics teacher that made the entire ground laugh for a full minute. Then the cultural programme — the junior school dance, the choir, and a play about the founding — and finally dinner for about two thousand people, which went on until the lights were switched off.

My own part was the documentary. Three of us worked on it since November: collecting photographs from alumni, recording four interviews on Deb’s phone, and cutting it all into eleven minutes. I did the script and the voice-over, which meant I sat in the AV room for two Sundays re-recording the same nine sentences because the fan kept showing up in the sound.

It was played on the big screen at half past five. I stood at the back and could not watch the screen at all, only the audience, which turned out to be the better view.

Come for the Founder’s Day in July. I have kept you a programme and one of the badges, and I am sending photographs with this letter.

Write back and tell me how the new school is treating you.

Yours affectionately, Ria

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

TWO tasks, and both must have real space:

1. DETAILS OF THE FUNCTION — what happened, in order
2. YOUR ROLE IN IT — a separate section, and the one candidates compress into a sentence

FORMAT: an INFORMAL letter to a friend — no receiver’s address, no subject line, and the close is "Yours affectionately" or "Your loving friend", never "Yours faithfully".

GIVE THE FUNCTION A SHAPE. A jubilee has a programme, so describe it in sequence — address, documentary, speeches, cultural programme, dinner. That structure alone earns content marks and saves you from a vague paragraph about everything being very grand.

FOR YOUR ROLE, be specific about the WORK rather than the honour. Two Sundays re-recording nine sentences because a fan was audible says more than "I was given an important responsibility".

A letter to someone who MISSED the event should acknowledge that in its opening and closing lines. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see the Formal Letter and Informal Letter references in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter.

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.