Liar
A girl was sitting on the hospital bed, her eyes was looking down on her swaying feet. She caught my attention. I stopped in front of her room, trying to figure out why she looked so weird. She wore a mask of dismal sadness, and a doleful song came out of her mouth. I shivered; her song sent an intangible chill down my back bone. Suddenly, she looked up and met my eyes. Her pensive expression revealed a sea of mournfulness. I turned around and dashed away as fast as I could. Trepidation gobbled up my mind.
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Peer Reviews
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Quality of writing
The Quality of Written Communication (QWC) is average, though some very simple errors have been made, quite apparently deliberately in some cases. The candidate makes only one use of speech marks when quoting some speech; elsewhere they use a dash. This is not standard and seems a pretty silly idea as speech marks and their use is something that is taught long before GCSE, and should thus be used. The candidate, at the pinnacle of the piece makes a very clumsy error, writing "she gave me a small piece of piece that wrote"; using "wrote" instead of "read" can dampen the effect of the final lines of the piece and so candidates must make sure they do not make silly errors such as these.
Level of analysis
The Level of Description will be marked here, as this is no analysis required to satisfy the mark scheme.The description is fair but not entirely convincing. Any writer should avoid the word "indescribable" like the plague as if something is indescribable, it renders any other word used to describe the object(s) claimed to be "indescribable" (in this essay's case it is unfortunately used twice - once to classify "awkwardness" and the next to classify "glee"; if these emotions can be identified, why would they be indescribable?). The candidate makes a fair use of literary and rhetorical devices throughout the answer, with varying degrees of success. There are no evident metaphors or similes, but perhaps this starkness was intentional? It certainly helps the emotional impact of the essay, but it does leave a lot of description redundant because it become ineffective, simply saying something literally. Personification and pathetic fallacy are used in reference to the weather, which is a nice reflection of the tone of the piece, but again, the candidate should work on using more literary devices that can create powerful imagery in the reader's minds with the use of similes and metaphors.
Response to question
The candidate here responds well to the question, a Writing to Describe tasks in which they describe a short period of time in a hospital ward with a girl who has terminal cancer. It is fairly well written, with occasional sentiment and poignancy in the selection of certain adjectives, though it can be argued that some word groupings do not quite give the reader a tangible feel of the moments the two characters share (more on this in Level of Analysis). The use of first person address is always a good tool to use when trying to create empathy as the readers will read the text as if they are experiencing the occurrences, so the candidate excels in their creation of sympathy and empathy as well as regret for the reader, but as before, some of the language needs a re-think because the description is not always clear and sometimes leads to a contradiction of terms.
