Study the picture given below. Write a story or a description or an account of what it suggests to you. Your composition may be about the subject of the picture, or you may take suggestions from it. However, there must be a clear connection between the picture and your composition.

MODEL APPROACH (the composition itself depends on the picture printed in your paper)

Whatever the image shows, a composition that scores must do three things:

1. ESTABLISH THE CONNECTION IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. A reader should be able to tell which picture you were given without being told. If the photograph shows a crowded railway platform, the platform should be on the page in the opening lines.

1. CHOOSE ONE FORM AND WRITE IT PROPERLY. A story needs a situation, a complication and a resolution. A description needs sensory detail and an organising order. An account needs a sequence of events and a reflection on them. Decide before you begin.

1. USE THE PICTURE AS A STARTING POINT, NOT A CAGE. The question allows you to "take suggestions from it", so a photograph of an empty bench may become a story about who last sat there. What it may not become is a composition with no traceable link to the image.

A RELIABLE OPENING if the picture puzzles you: two or three sentences of concrete visual detail from the image, then move into your narrative through one element within it — a face, an object, the light, the weather.

See the narrative, descriptive and argumentative models in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter for the shape each form should take.

WHY THIS OPTION IS BOTH THE EASIEST AND THE RISKIEST

Easiest, because you may write in any form and can play to your strength.

Riskiest, because of one sentence: "there must be a CLEAR CONNECTION between the picture and your composition". Every year candidates attach a rehearsed composition to the image with a token reference and lose content marks for it. The connection must be structural.

TEST BEFORE YOU BEGIN: state in one sentence how your composition arises from the picture. If you cannot, choose a different option.

Do not announce the form ("I shall now describe the picture"). Let the writing show what it is. 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.