Descriptive essay - Description of a fun fair and guidelines on writing about a football match.

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Description of a fun fair

It was a scorching hot summer’s day: perfect for a day at the fair. The sky was dotted with a few fluffy clouds that looked like candy floss.

The entrance to the fair could be seen in the distance and the long queues edged forward slowly. Customers were becoming increasingly excited and impatient as they took a few steps forward every so often. Faint music could be heard from beyond the tall gates with the occasional happy scream suddenly piercing the air. Closer to the entrance and the massive structures of the rides could be seen: a rollercoaster, a big wheel, a helter skelter. They were steel giants reaching for the sun.  

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Once inside, the braver kids ran towards the first rollercoaster. It zipped back and forth across the queue as fast as a bullet. Those sat at the front screamed the loudest, their eyes bulging like frogs, as the wind howled into their faces. Hands gripped the safety bars like a vice as the shuttle suddenly flipped upside down. One formerly cocky boy, immediately felt nauseous, his confidence knocked and his turned face a sickly green colour.

Below, younger children stood watching, eating their sweets and snacks. Ice creams wobbled perilously over the cones and dripped down their small ...

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The Quality of Written Communication is good, especially because, unlike most Writing to Describe tasks, the candidate's writing style does not appear unduly clogged up or as if it is aiming to cram as many adjective and adverbs into the answer as possible, meaning it reads more fluidly than some answer than incorrectly apply the vocabulary. The grammar is therefore perfect; spelling is an issue ans neither is punctuation. Though, is the candidate really wants to show off, the use of more complex punctuation points like semi-colon and colons could greatly enhance the pace of the piece.

The Level of Analysis is not marked here, but Description and Creativity are, so I will comment on these. The Level of Description is good, and the candidate makes a gallant attempt in light of the rigid structure they had to adhere to. There is a fair use of descriptive writing techniques and the candidate's frenetic energy does come out in some instances, particularly describing the children in the observation with the use of syntactic parallelisms, repetition and triples.

This is a very competent essay response to a Writing to Describe task. The candidate has kindly posted the guidelines which act as a structural aid for this answer, and there is a good adherence to them. I would argue this may limit the creativity that could be displayed but if these are set by the teacher as obligatory rules then so be it. The first paragraph is a promising start, drawing parallels with the event being described and the description of the cloud (likening them to "candy floss"). Clever little things like this are always good in your answer, as they make the examiner think less literally and show them that the answer is carefully and cleverly augmented. There is a good use of a range of vocabulary and descriptive techniques (metaphors, similes, anthropomorphism), but I would like to see a more diverse use of sentence lengths, particularly when describing the rollercoaster - shorter, sharper sentences could really heighten the drama and intensity of such rides, rather than drawing out long sentences with elaborate descriptions, quickfire adjectives and and quickened pace would help the reader feel as if they were actually there.