Write an original short story entitled 'The Gift'.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 380 words)

THE GIFT

For my fourteenth birthday my father gave me a fountain pen, and I was so disappointed that I could not keep it off my face.

I had asked for a phone. Every single person in my class had one. I had made the case over four months with the persistence of a lawyer, and I had believed, right up to the moment the box was in my hands, that I had won.

It was a black Parker with a steel cap, second-hand, and there was an inscription on the barrel in letters so small you had to tilt it to the light: A.K.S., 1962.

"It was your grandfather’s," my father said.

I said thank you in the voice of somebody saying thank you. He heard it. He did not say anything, and I have thought about that silence a great deal since.

The pen went into a drawer, where it stayed for eleven months. What brought it out was an essay competition in Class Nine with a rule that entries be handwritten, and a ballpoint that failed in the second paragraph. I went to the drawer because there was nothing else in the house.

It is difficult to explain what happened then to somebody who has only ever used a ballpoint. The nib had been worn by somebody else’s hand for forty years, at somebody else’s angle, and for the first page it fought me. Then it stopped fighting. My handwriting — which my teachers had called careless since I was seven — came out of that pen looking like an adult’s.

I did not win the competition. I have used the pen every day since.

My father told me the rest much later. My grandfather had bought it in 1962 with the first salary he earned as a clerk, which was ninety rupees, and the pen had cost eleven. He had written every letter of his life with it, including the one that got my father into college, and including the one he wrote to my mother’s family to ask for the marriage.

I am seventeen now. I have a phone, which I got two years later and which I have already replaced once.

The pen is on my desk. I take it to every examination, and when I am nervous I hold it, and it is the single most valuable object I own.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The TITLE IS GIVEN and is the only instruction, so the whole story must turn on a gift. Note the LENGTH: 350-400 words in this year’s paper, longer than the 300-350 of later years, and worth 25 marks rather than 20.

THE MOST RELIABLE STRUCTURE for this title is a gift that is not appreciated at first and comes to matter later. It gives you automatic movement — rejection, then reversal — and lets you end on a change in the narrator rather than on the gift itself.

AVOID the rehearsed plots: the poor child given a present by a kind stranger, and the gift of life or friendship revealed in the last line. Both are written by hundreds of candidates.

Notice that the model never states its moral. The final paragraph contrasts the phone (replaced once already) with the pen, and leaves the reader to draw the conclusion — which is always stronger than announcing it. 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.