Coursework: Planning, Drafting and Redrafting: Question 5
Syllabus W3, W5
A candidate's teacher has given this feedback on a coursework reflective account paragraph:
"Your ideas here are relevant, but you are just listing what happened rather than explaining why each event mattered. You also start all four sentences with 'I', vary your sentence openings."
The paragraph the feedback refers to reads:
"I organised a bake sale at school to raise money for a local charity. I baked over sixty cupcakes with my friends the weekend before. I sold every single cake within the first hour of lunchtime. I gave all the money we raised to the charity's local office."
(a) Identify what this paragraph needs to change to respond to both points in the feedback. [2]
(b) Redraft the paragraph (4–5 sentences), responding fully to the feedback. [6]
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Worked solution
Assessment focus
This question tests a skill specific to coursework’s untimed process: treating teacher feedback as material to act on directly. A strong response identifies exactly what each point of feedback requires and then demonstrably fixes both, rather than producing a superficially different paragraph that still has the same underlying problems.
What the redraft needs to change (part a)
- Reflection, not listing: every original sentence states a bare event (organised, baked, sold, gave) with no comment on why it mattered. The redraft needs to explain significance, such as what the experience taught the writer or how it reflects on the community’s support.
- Sentence openings: all four sentences begin with “I”, so at least some sentences need to open differently (for example with a gerund, a subordinate clause, or a different subject) to remove the monotony the teacher names directly.
Model redraft (part b)
“Organising a bake sale for a local charity taught me more about planning and teamwork than I expected. My friends and I spent the weekend before baking over sixty cupcakes, dividing the work so that no single stall ran out of stock during the day. When every cake sold within the first hour of lunchtime, it was clear how much support existed across the school for this cause. Handing the money over to the charity’s local office afterwards made the whole effort feel genuinely worthwhile, rather than a one-off school activity.”
Why this works
No sentence in the redraft begins with a bare “I”: the openings are a gerund phrase (“Organising…”), a different subject (“My friends and I…”), a subordinate clause (“When every cake…”), and another gerund phrase (“Handing the money…”), directly answering the second point of feedback. Each sentence also adds a reason the event mattered (a lesson learned, evidence of community support, a sense of worthwhile effort) rather than simply reporting that it happened, answering the first point. The four original pieces of content (organising, baking, selling, donating) are all still present, so nothing has been lost in the process of improving the paragraph.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
- Reordering the same four sentences without adding any reflection, which changes nothing the feedback actually asked for.
- Replacing “I” with “I” again inside a slightly rearranged sentence (e.g. “After that, I gave…”), which does not count as a genuinely different opening.
- Writing a strong final reflective sentence but leaving the first three sentences as an unchanged, unreflective list.