Directed Writing: Transforming Texts: Question 10

Worked solution

Assessment focus

This question isolates a core directed-writing skill that underpins every task in this topic: genuine transformation means being BOTH accurate to the source AND reshaped into the target text type’s own voice, not simply copying the source’s wording, and not inventing details that go beyond it.

Why B is correct

Option B reorders and develops the notes (opening with the acts and the magician rather than the date), uses newsletter-appropriate, lively phrasing (“lit up”, “crowning”, “a brilliant £340”), and keeps every fact accurate to the source: the talent show was on Friday, fifteen acts took part, a magician was the audience’s favourite, and £340 was raised for the school library. It satisfies both criteria at once: faithful and genuinely rewritten, without adding any detail the notes do not support.

Why the distractors are wrong

• A is accurate but is simply the three notes joined together with no reshaping at all. This is copied source material, not a transformed newsletter paragraph.
• C reads as lively newsletter prose, but it is not accurate: it invents “every single student” (not in the notes) and inflates both the total raised, to “over a thousand pounds,” and its purpose, to “new laptops,” neither of which appears in the source. Fluent language does not earn credit for a directed-writing task if it is not built on accurate source material.
• D is accurate to the source facts but uses stiff, bureaucratic report register (“This report documents the proceedings…”, “generated… revenue”) that is entirely wrong for a school newsletter. Accuracy without appropriate register is not full transformation either.

Mark scheme

• 1 mark for selecting B.
• 0 marks for any other option. No partial credit, since this is a discrete single-answer selection question.