Continuation writing: honouring the two given openers
The source passage ends with Ethan, 13, hiding an injured dog in the garage during a storm. He tells no one, because since the family moved into a flat with no garden his father has said “no more animals”. The task supplies two paragraph openers:
Paragraph 1: “The next morning, Dad opened the garage door.” Paragraph 2: “Three weeks later, the dog had a name and a place by the fire.”
The student's draft runs 235 words for a task that allows about 150. In it, a vet called Dr. Patel arrives in paragraph 1, takes the dog to a clinic and telephones the father; paragraph 2 lists the dog's tricks; the tense slips into the present twice (“Ethan is smiling”); and the final line is “Animals teach us responsibility.”
1. The two openers are fixed. State what paragraph 1 must achieve and what it must not do, given the second opener.
Read the worked answer
The second opener is a constraint disguised as a sentence: it guarantees that in three weeks the dog is named, kept and indoors. Paragraph 1 therefore cannot send the dog away, because that would contradict a fact the reader is handed later - a continuity error, not a stylistic choice.
What paragraph 1 must do:
- Pay off the concealment the opener forces: Dad sees the dog.
- Show the father's first reaction consistent with his established reason - practical, not cruel: no garden, cost, the flat.
- Land on a decision or a trial, not on a full resolution, and stop where “three weeks later” can plausibly begin (dog allowed to stay “for now”).
What it must avoid: the vet scene (a named character who needs an arc you have no room for), a new setting, and any resolution of the whole story. Beats: discovery → anger → Ethan's plea → one short exchange → Dad's hesitation. Keep the source's narrative past throughout.
2. The draft is 85 words over. Give a priority order for cutting, and say why each cut is safe.
Read the worked answer
Cut in this order:
- Dr. Patel and the clinic (~60 words). A named outsider with an independent action is a subplot; removing him removes an arc, a phone call and a journey, and restores the story to two characters.
- The list of tricks (~35 words). A list is inventory, not event; it advances nothing and the opener already tells us the dog is settled.
- The closing moral, “Animals teach us responsibility.” The second opener - a name and a place by the fire - has already shown the change; stating it converts a scene into a slogan and is the most commonly penalised ending in this task.
- Weather and mood description that does not bear on the decision.
Keep: the discovery beat, one line of Dad's dialogue and one of Ethan's, and one concrete practical detail (Ethan offering to walk the dog before school, to answer the “no garden” objection on its own terms). Then fix the tense: “Ethan is smiling” → “Ethan smiled”; the narrative frame is past, and present-tense slips read as carelessness rather than as technique.
3. The student wants to replace the second opener with “Ethan laughed.” so that his joke about the tricks can follow. How do you respond, and what does the answer reveal about the task?
Read the worked answer
He cannot: the supplied openers must be used as given, as the first sentence of each paragraph. They are part of the prompt, not a suggestion, and substituting one loses marks before the content is even read.
What the request reveals is more useful than the rule. The student is treating the openers as obstacles to write around, when they are the scaffold: the second one already performs the work his tricks list was attempting - it establishes time passed, a name chosen, and acceptance inside the home. Once a writer sees that the opener has already delivered the outcome, the paragraph's job becomes showing how, not restating that.
Practical fix: keep the opener verbatim, then begin with a single concrete image of the dog by the fire, and let one short exchange with Dad carry the change. The joke, if kept, should be one clause, not a catalogue.