690 Words for a 450-Word Narrative
A student submits a narrative for a 25-mark task with a 400–450 word limit. The draft is 690 words, broken down as follows: 310 words describing a market at dawn (sounds, colours, a vendor calling prices); 90 words introducing the narrator and her brother; 140 words in which the brother loses the money they were sent to collect; 110 words in which a stranger returns it; 40 words ending "Then I woke up. It had all been a dream."
The mark scheme gives 13 marks for content and organisation (engaging central idea, coherent structure, a genuine sense of an ending) and 12 marks for style and accuracy (sentence variety, precise vocabulary, technical control).
The student's note at the bottom reads: "I know it's too long. I'll delete the market description because it doesn't move the story on, and that should fix it." The deadline is tomorrow morning and there is no time for a full rewrite, only for directed revision.
1. Respond to the student's plan. How far do you agree, and what should actually be cut?
Read the worked answer
I agree with the arithmetic and disagree with the surgery. Deleting the 310-word description does reach the limit, but it removes the best writing on the page and leaves a 380-word story whose climax still gets only 110 words. The problem is not length; it is proportion. A story that spends 45 per cent of its words on setting and 6 per cent on its ending is unbalanced whatever the word count.
A workable budget:
| Section | Now | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Market description | 310 | 130 |
| Introduction | 90 | 60 |
| Loss of money | 140 | 120 |
| Stranger returns it | 110 | 100 |
| Ending | 40 | 30 |
| Total | 690 | 440 |
That is 250 words cut, but spread rather than concentrated. Trim the description to two or three strong images (keep the vendor's call and one sound, cut the colour list), tighten the introduction to two sentences, and use the words saved to make the loss and the return consequential.
Explain the principle plainly: in narrative marking, description earns style marks only when it is doing something - setting mood, planting the stranger, showing the family's poverty. Description that could be lifted out and pasted into another story earns nothing.
2. Explain how the ending costs marks, and offer two replacement endings that fit in about 30 words.
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"Then I woke up" costs marks three times over. It breaks the contract with the reader: everything that was at stake is retroactively cancelled, so the tension the student built is wasted. It removes consequence - nothing the brother did matters, which is the opposite of a "sense of an ending". And it is almost always a sign the writer did not know how to stop, which markers read as a structural weakness, not a clever twist. In a 13-mark organisation band, an earned ending is often the difference between the middle and top bands.
Two replacements, each about 30 words:
- "The stranger counted the notes into my brother's hand, then kept one between two fingers - 'for my trouble' - and was gone before either of us thought to argue."
- "My brother swore he had never dropped the envelope. I looked at the stranger's shoes, recognised them, and said nothing all the way home."
Both endings leave a cost or a choice unresolved in a controlled way: something has changed, and the reader can feel the change. That is what "a sense of an ending" means - not a resolution of every detail, but a last movement that lands.
If the student wants to keep the dream device, the only defensible version is a dream that changes the waking world - but there is no room for that in 30 words.
3. The student protests that cutting the description will lose the best vocabulary in the piece. Answer that objection with a concrete plan.
Read the worked answer
The objection is half right, and it points to the solution. The description is where the precise vocabulary lives - that is why it scores. The answer is not to keep 310 words of it or to delete it, but to compress it so the best words survive at higher density.
Concrete method:
- Take the description and highlight the five phrases that are genuinely precise (a specific sound, the vendor's actual words, one colour, one smell, one movement).
- Write a 130-word version containing only those five, plus the two sentences of introduction.
- Read both aloud. If the short version loses atmosphere, add one sentence back, not a paragraph.
- Move any good phrase that would work better elsewhere - the vendor's call can reappear at the climax, which also makes the setting feel structural rather than decorative.
This is what compression means in practice: the same vocabulary, fewer words, higher concentration. A marker rewarding "precise vocabulary" is rewarding density, not volume - 300 words of colour lists often score lower than 120 words of exact observation.
Last point to make: revision under time pressure is a skill being examined in its own right. Choosing what to cut, and cutting the weakest 250 words rather than the easiest 250, is exactly the judgement the top band describes.