Have you ever said or done something that changed the life of another person? Give an account of your words or actions that led to this change and describe how the experience made you feel.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

WHAT I SAID TO JOYDEEP

I did not know at the time that I had changed anything. I found out four years later, at a wedding, from his mother.

Joydeep joined our class in the July of Class Seven and was, for about five months, the loneliest person I have ever seen. He had come from Silchar, his Bengali had an accent the boys found funny, and he had made the tactical error in his first week of answering too many questions correctly. By September nobody sat with him at lunch.

What I did was not brave and I want to be honest about that. I did not defend him. I did not tell anyone to stop. I was twelve and I was not going to spend my own standing on somebody I barely knew.

What I did was ask him, one afternoon in the corridor, whether he would help me with a chapter of algebra I could not follow.

I asked because I genuinely could not follow it and because he was plainly the person most likely to know. There was no kindness in it. We sat in the library for forty minutes and he explained factorisation better than our teacher had managed in three weeks, and at the end of it I said, meaning nothing by it, "You should teach. You are better at this than Sir."

His mother told me at the wedding that he had come home that evening and repeated the sentence to her, twice.

He is doing a mathematics degree now and tutors two children in his building on Sundays. She said it was the first thing anybody in that school had told him he was good at.

How it made me feel was not pride, which is what I expected. It was something closer to alarm. I have thought about it often since — that a sentence I do not remember saying, thrown out carelessly in a library, did more for someone than anything I have ever done on purpose.

I am much more careful now about what I say to people.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, all carrying content marks:

1. WHAT you said or did
2. an ACCOUNT of how it led to the change
3. how the experience MADE YOU FEEL

The third is a separate task with its own marks and must have its own closing section — not one tacked-on sentence.

A STRATEGIC POINT. Candidates almost always choose a grand intervention — saving someone from drowning, stopping a bully, giving money to the poor — and these are hard to make convincing. A SMALL, ACCIDENTAL act of influence is both more believable and more interesting, and it allows a more honest answer to the third task.

Notice that the model refuses to flatter its narrator: he says plainly that he was not brave and meant no kindness. That honesty is what makes the closing feeling — alarm rather than pride — land. Examiners reward a composition that surprises them. 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.