DESCRIPTIVE COMPOSITION: how a description is judged, with a complete worked example.

WHAT A DESCRIPTION IS JUDGED ON

Nothing needs to HAPPEN. A description is judged on SENSORY DETAIL and on the ORDER in which you move through the scene.

Cover more than sight. Sound is the sense candidates forget; smell and touch earn extra credit. Move through the scene in a followable order — near to far, youngest to oldest, one place to the next — rather than jumping about. If the question names two things (what you SEE and what you HEAR, or the scene BEFORE and AFTER), both must be present and given real space. Present tense suits description and keeps it immediate.

WORKED MODEL (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.

WHY THIS MODEL SCORES

SOUND is everywhere — the bell, the chairs, the shrieking, the "single continuous roar". Smell appears (pickle, banana) and touch (the shimmering tar). That range of senses is what separates a B from an A. The ORDER is deliberate: youngest children, then middle school, then the older students; compound, then corridor, then ground. The reader can follow the writer walking. The question asked how the scene CHANGES after the bell, so the change gets its own short paragraph and a closing image. Specific nouns do the work: neem tree, parathas, tennis ball, canteen queue. "There were many students eating food" is the same sentence with the marks removed.

A USEFUL TRICK: end on one small detail left behind rather than a summary sentence. It reads as observed rather than composed.