Describe what you see and hear as you move about the corridors and compound during your school break time. How does the scene change after the bell rings?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

FORTY MINUTES

The bell does not so much ring as detonate. For three seconds after it, the school holds its breath. Then two thousand chairs scrape back at once and the corridors fill like a river in spate.

The little ones come out first, in a solid, shouting wave, making for the neem tree in the compound where the shade is coolest. Their lunchboxes are already open before they sit. There is the smell of parathas and pickle, of fried rice, of somebody’s over-ripe banana. Above them the parrots quarrel in the branches over the fruit, and every few minutes a green flock wheels overhead and the children shriek with delight as though it has never happened before.

Further along, the middle school has claimed the corridor outside the staffroom, which is against the rules and therefore desirable. Someone is trading a sandwich for two rotis. Someone else is retelling, with enormous gestures, a goal scored yesterday. The sound in a school corridor is not really speech at all; it is a single continuous roar with occasional words floating to the surface.

Out on the ground the older boys have organised a cricket match with a tennis ball and a drawn wicket, and the girls have taken the steps of the assembly hall, where the acoustics are good for arguing. The canteen queue coils twice around the pillar. The sun stands directly overhead and the tar of the basketball court shimmers.

Then the bell goes a second time.

The change is not gradual. Within a minute the ground is empty, the wicket abandoned mid-over, the queue dissolved. The roar recedes down the corridors and is shut, classroom by classroom, behind doors. What is left is a compound full of evidence: a dropped cap, a flattened carton, crumbs being investigated by crows, the parrots returning to the branches now that the danger has passed.

The neem tree keeps swaying. It has forty minutes to wait.

HOW TO SCORE ON A DESCRIPTIVE COMPOSITION

The single most important rule: a description is judged on SENSORY DETAIL, not on narrative. Nothing needs to happen. What must happen is that the examiner can see and hear the place.

The question names both verbs — what you SEE and what you HEAR — so both must be present, and sound is the one candidates forget. Smell and touch earn extra credit: the pickle, the shimmering tar.

The question also sets a STRUCTURE, and following it is worth content marks: the scene during break (the bulk of the composition) the change after the bell rings (a clear final movement) A composition that never reaches the bell has answered only half the question.

Technique that lifts the expression mark: move through the scene in an order the reader can follow — here, youngest to oldest, compound to corridor to ground — rather than jumping about at random. Present tense suits description and keeps it immediate.

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.