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GCSE: Writing to Inform, Explain and Describe

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Writing to inform

  1. 1 Give factual information and use a formal style.
  2. 2 Use straightforward language to convey essential information. Your audience could be anyone.
  3. 3 Use the present tense, write in short clear sentences, address the reader as 'you'. Use connectives and technical terms.
  4. 4 Break up your writing with diagrams, illustrations, images and subheadings.
  5. 5 You can give more information (eg: why and what you find interesting) and the genre could ask you to give instructions, write recipes, give directions or write manuals.

Writing to explain

  1. 1 Establish who you are writing to and why you are writing.
  2. 2 Genre – Explaining data, giving a speech or explaining how a mechanism works.
  3. 3 Purpose – To be clear, to show meaning and to make something clearer.
  4. 4 Write in the third person, use either past or present tenses, use clear factual language.
  5. 5 Give a balanced view and use connectives of comparison (whereas, though, while, unless, however).

Writing to describe

  1. 1 Your thoughts and feelings are important.
  2. 2 Genre – Writing a story, describe a scene, writing a diary entry.
  3. 3 Purpose is to build an image in the reader's mind.
  4. 4 Use adjectives and adverbs, similes, metaphors and all five senses ( touch, smell, taste, sight, sound).

  • Marked by Teachers essays 61
  • Peer Reviewed essays 37

  1. Creating writing - describe a place you think is beautiful.

    As i sit on the edge of the rocky cliff, i truly appreciate what beauty nature is! My eyes peer over to the valley, where i can here the noise of laughter from young children playing along the beach creating lifetime memories ; as the paranoid mother shouts at them to come back home in time for dinner. While others would find this annoying and abrupt, i feel a flashback of the beautiful times i once had here as a child.

    • Word count: 403

  2. GCSE Imaginative Writing: Write a short story set in a maximum security penitentary

    I quickly loaded two rounds into the first and second chamber, afterwards placing it back in its sheath. I checked my watch; 23:45. It was almost time. Jenkins left the Inn as expected. He was a very, very tall man, dressed in baggy trousers and a stained white shirt with the top button undone. He walked slowly and clumsily, carrying a small, leather briefcase in his left hand. This is him. This is the man I was about to kill. My heart was racing and my hands were shaking. The brutal, bitter downpour hammered against the concrete, overpowering any other sound that dare challenge it.

    • Word count: 829

  3. The horrors of the aged house still hound me

    • Word count: 507

  4. Write a story about a person who lost all his possession while helping other people.

    • Word count: 658

  5. Infected - creative writing. Even the dim-witted early men predicted that human intemperance would eventually lead to their own extinction

    • Word count: 832

  6. Identity. Tugging my bag onto the shoulder of my ironed blue uniform, I set off towards the crime scene.

    • Word count: 956

  7. The fog grabbed onto the freezing air, the snow slept on the houses

    All I can hear is the snow crunching beneath my feet as I dreadfully walk step by step over and over. I shouldn?t have done that I thought, all these thoughts circled my head, over and over ?why did I do it?? I cried, I felt a chill go down my spine as my voice rasped through the dark, cold and empty night.

    • Word count: 401

  8. Speech about Gaming PC's

    A graphic card has lots of processors that send data to one chip to another. These chips start to heat up, so a cooling fan is attached to these cards, so the chips stay cool and process at super speeds. If a game is played using an old graphics card, then the games starts to lag, and you don?t get smooth game play. This means the graphics card starts to go under pressure and it can?t handle all the data that is sent through the chips.

    • Word count: 654

  9. Learning a Lesson. My irritation reached a fervor as I stood up to challenge him. Being only two years apart, we had competed at almost everything since childhood,

    Being only two years apart, we had competed at almost everything since childhood, be it Yu-Gi-Oh matches in our primary years to playing tennis and basketball matches in our adolescent years. Though he was older, I had a size advantage and possessed the aggressiveness that accompanies a younger sibling?s temperament. ?Why do you care? Not everyone is a math genius like you.? He simply said, ?You can do better.? My brother was considered a math prodigy at our high school.

    • Word count: 652

  10. A Narrative of when I was particularly nervous

    This is it. This is really happening. The windows shrieks as it recedes into the door. A forceful blast of cold, winter air slams into my drenched face, sending beads of cold sweat that were settling on my water flying into the car seat, and soaking into the warm, depressed fabric. I look ahead and see endless rows of red, piercing flares ahead of our car. Yes! There?s been a pile up. My saviour. I sigh a heavy breath of relief as the sweat dries off my coated palms and shimmering face.

    • Word count: 489

  11. Description of a City - Tokyo

    To the right, I could see the emperor?s home in the middle of a park?s lake, the Imperial Palace. I was enjoying the silence until the driver bombarded me with questions in a language I had merely heard in anime shows I occasionally saw on TV when I was a child. He wouldn?t stop talking until I arrived at my destination, even though I didn?t say a single word in reply.

    • Word count: 462

  12. Narrative writing -Mountain story controlled assesment

    ?It?s completely fine let?s keep going? replied Bryan calmly. I unconvinced trusted him so we carried on. It had not been even 10 minutes; we started to feel the earth tremble as if an earthquake had struck. Suddenly, tons of snow began to flooding down towards us; I bellowed at the top my voice: ?Avalanche, run Bryan? Terrified we scurried like two beetles searching for food, the only difference being was that we were looking for shelter. Regardless of how hard we tried to escape the wrath we were soon caught by the lightning pace of the snow.

    • Word count: 812

  13. Dystopian writing. Imagine a world without emotion. A world where there is no colour.

    You see long ago my community was so happy and joyous; everyone was full of contentment. Towns were so full of passion and were ever so exuberant. But then World War 4 struck, and the Chancellor decided to get rid of colour and emotion because it made people feel different and that?s what caused conflict between one another. Society now is made to avoid conflict, war and hatred. But in all honesty, I?ve never felt this melancholy. I turned on the television, only to see the Chancellor staring right back at me. This evil, cold blooded creature changed everything for us I thought to myself whilst staring into his diabolical eyes.

    • Word count: 642
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Conclusion analysis

Good conclusions usually refer back to the question or title and address it directly - for example by using key words from the title.
How well do you think these conclusions address the title or question? Answering these questions should help you find out.

  1. Do they use key words from the title or question?
  2. Do they answer the question directly?
  3. Can you work out the question or title just by reading the conclusion?

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Peer reviewed

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