Descriptive writing: The old yellow taxi came to a screeching halt in front of David, splashing him with droplets of polluted rainwater from the previous night.

Review of essay

Rating: 3 star(s)

Response to the question

This is a Creative Writing task where the candidate describes an unpleasant experience. The answer here is focused, but alas, there is no direction to the piece. There is not even any inclination as to why the candidate gave his protagonist a name, as it does not feature as an aspect of the piece - it only means something to the reader and it is not at all symbolic and does not carry any allegorical weight. It seems pointless. Not only that, this story goes nowhere; there is very little description that leads to a story - this is merely a description of surroundings and very little occurs plot-wise. This is not good for candidates wishing to write interesting short stories.

Level of analysis

The candidate write at fair length about something that is of very little importance, and their descriptions of the events that do occur is not sufficient enough to gain much higher than a low D grade for GCSE. It is a common misconception to all candidates struggling to achieve higher than a C grade that by stacking adjective upon adjective, they are describing well. The candidate has not taken into consideration the rounding of any character - David and the driver appear merely as vehicles to show off the poorly-constructed vocabulary which has been clumsily stacked on top of itself and leads to sentences like "The odious sight was distasteful" create a paradox with one powerful adjective and another which suggests and air of reserved formality, meaning the image is ambiguous and hard to imagine. Candidates should exercise more control over the language they use as imagery is everything in creative writing tasks.

Quality of writing

The Quality of Written Communication is fair, though the over-indulgence in an adjective/adverb thesaurus has compromised the fluency of the piece. A small bit of more complex punctuation points would also improve this answer.