Assignment Details

Imaginative Writing CSWK

2024-25

10B English

Date

June 13, 2025

Additional Info
Please use this lesson to plan and begin writing your imaginative writing piece for the final Language coursework. You need to think carefully about both the narrative that you are constructing as well as how you write it. Here are some top tips to consider as you start.

Choose your question from the coursework booklet (on the Content Library). Please note that whilst the question asks you to write a descriptive piece, this does not mean that you are solely and simply describing the image in front of you - you need to create some form of narrative as well in order to meet the demands of the task/mark scheme. I have attached a list of all the past paper questions/titles from 2018-2023 which you can peruse and use to help kickstart your thinking if you are struggling.

Follow a narrative arc: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. There needs to be some sort of conflict or problem that is resolved. Like we practiced on Tuesday, think about trying to contain your story within the space of one hour and use moments of flashbacks to create movement and action.

Top tips:
  • Be creative, but don't be too ambitious in what you can achieve - you only have 1000 words. To achieve a top-end mark, your narrative must have draw to a close: no cliff hangers please. You could consider using a cyclical structure.
  • You need one central character, but a maximum of three characters in total (a collective, like a crowd, counts as one of your characters). Each character needs to have depth, detail and description, therefore any more than three is absorbing a huge amount of your word count.
  • Descriptive detail is essential in order to help your reader build a sensory mental picture. Don't overlook this aspect in your writing.
  • Be interesting with your vocabulary choices, but be careful of just throwing in any synonym - your words must make sense in the context of your sentence.
  • Draw on a wide range of linguistic and structural techniques to add colour and flare to your writing. Have you included at least one in each paragraph?
  • Use the DFZE structure to frame your response and you need at least four structured parts to your response, however, I would also like to see you being experimental with your paragraph lengths: can you include at least one short paragraph (1-2 sentences) for dramatic impact?
  • Any characters that you introduce must be credible characters. Even if you were writing sci-fi, their personalities need to be relatable in some way to the reader so, for example, they feel emotions of isolation or excitement at new discoveries. I would advise that you stick to a human perspective for the purposes of these pieces.
  • You can choose what person you write in (first, second or third), however, you must maintain this throughout the piece. This particular piece isn't really long enough for you to offer alternative perspectives. Note that the second person ('you'), whilst sometimes incredibly interesting, is probably the hardest to maintain convincingly.
  • You can choose whether to write your narrative in the past or present tense (avoid the future - you cannot add detail to something that hasn't yet happened). Once you have chosen your tense, maintain this throughout the story: do not flip between past and present for the main narrative, though if you write in the present tense, you can of course refer to things that have previously happened, e.g. 'Ari remembers how she had felt safe and warm at home with her parents. Now, she feels the cold biting through her jacket and she longs for just a morsel of food.'
Attachments