Descriptive Composition: Question 1

Worked solution

Assessment focus

This task tests whether a candidate can build atmosphere by deliberately favouring the senses examiners see least often, sound and smell, over the default of sight, and can imply a mood through selected detail rather than announcing it.

Mark scheme (10 marks)

• Sensory range (3 marks): at least one precise sound detail and one precise smell detail, genuinely foregrounded rather than mentioned in passing; sight, if present at all, stays secondary.
• Precision of word choice (3 marks): specific, original vocabulary (e.g. naming an exact sound or smell) rather than generic labels such as “noisy” or “delicious smells.”
• Controlling atmosphere (2 marks): one clear, sustained mood (e.g. warm chaos, sensory overload, a comforting hum) rather than a mix of unrelated impressions.
• Showing not telling / register (2 marks): the mood is implied through detail, not stated as a fact, and no narrative action is introduced.

Model opening (98 words)

Smoke and hot oil rose together over the alley, thick with turmeric and charring skewered meat, and somewhere beneath it a woman fanned coals that hissed each time fat dripped onto them. A tangle of voices pressed in from every direction, one hawker calling out prices in a singsong chant, another haggling in short, clipped bursts, a radio somewhere playing static-edged music nobody seemed to be listening to. Underneath it all ran a steady clatter of woks and tin ladles against pot rims, a rhythm the whole street seemed to move to without noticing it was there.

Why this works

Sound and smell arrive in the very first clause (“smoke and hot oil,” before any visual detail), and each sensory detail is specific (“turmeric and charring skewered meat,” “a singsong chant”) rather than generic. The atmosphere (busy, layered, almost musical chaos) is built entirely through accumulated detail; no sentence states “it was a lively market.” Nothing happens beyond simple movement of sound through the space, keeping the paragraph descriptive rather than narrative.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

• Opening with a visual list (“Stalls lined the street, covered in bright fabric…”) before mentioning sound or smell at all, which under-weights the two senses the task asks for.
• Writing “it smelled amazing and sounded busy,” which names the senses without giving the reader anything precise to imagine.