The Deceptive Opening: Choosing the 100-Mark Composition
Fiona is sitting Paper 1 with 2 hours 50 minutes on the clock. She has spent 45 minutes on Question A (50 marks) and now has roughly 100 minutes for Composing (100 marks), planning included. She has narrowed the seven options to three. Option one is a personal essay prompted by the phrase 'The year everything changed'; she has a genuine memory of a hospital corridor at 3 a.m. and her father's hands. Option two is a short story that must begin 'The door was already open when I got home'; she has a clever twist ending but no middle. Option three is a speech titled 'Young people are not apathetic - they are exhausted', which looks lively but which she has never attempted under timed conditions. Fiona's known weakness is overwriting: in the mock she produced 1,400 words of introduction and ran out of time. Her teacher has told her that the composing mark depends on clarity of purpose, engagement with the task, coherence and control of language.
1. Which of the three options should Fiona commit to, and what should the decision actually rest on?
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The personal essay is the defensible choice, but the reasoning matters more than the answer.
Material. 'The year everything changed' is attached to a real memory - a corridor at 3 a.m., her father's hands. Composing rewards writing that sounds like a person rather than a performance; specific, sensory detail is the cheapest route to the engagement criterion and the hardest thing to fake in an exam hall.
Structural risk. The short story's twist is a device, not a plot. Without a middle she would improvise 600 words between the required opening sentence and the ending, at speed, with no time to revise. A story whose only strength is its last line reads as thin, and the required opening sentence will sit awkwardly if the story was built backwards from a punchline.
Familiarity under pressure. The speech title is attractive, but a speech demands sustained awareness of an audience, direct address and rhetorical rhythm. Novelty is expensive when you have 100 minutes and a documented habit of running out of time.
Consequence. Eight to ten minutes planning (five bullets, one per paragraph, not a script), about 80 minutes writing, eight minutes proofreading. One minute per mark means there is no second draft.
2. Fiona's instinct is to begin 'Change is a word we hear every day' or with a dictionary definition. Design a better opening of three short paragraphs and explain what each move earns.
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Paragraph 1 - in the corridor, no preamble. 'At 3 a.m. the corridor lights are the colour of old milk. My father is asleep sitting up, and his hands are doing something I have never seen them do: nothing.' This establishes place, time, image and an unanswered question in three sentences, and gives the examiner a voice in the first line - which is exactly what clarity of purpose and engagement are testing.
Paragraph 2 - one concrete 'before'. A single remembered detail of the father as he was, not a list. Contrast is what makes the word 'changed' visible; a list of past events dilutes it and eats words she does not have.
Paragraph 3 - turn the screw. 'What I did not know then was that the year would not end in that corridor; it would begin there.' The examiner now knows what the essay is doing, and the theme arrives as implication rather than as a definition.
Avoid: dictionary definitions, 'In this essay I will', and any sentence that could open anyone's essay. Each of those signals a formulaic response before the marker has met the writer.
3. At the 70-minute mark she has 900 words and no ending. What are her options, and which does she take?
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Take the ending immediately, in three or four sentences. She has roughly 30 minutes left but should not spend them all on expansion: a composition that stops mid-thought loses more on coherence than extra volume can recover.
Best move - close the circle. Return to the corridor image, the lights and the hands, but from the position of now, so that the final paragraph answers in image what paragraph 3 raised as a question. Three sentences is enough.
Second-best move if the circle will not close: a short reflective paragraph naming what changed and what did not. One honest sentence beats a paragraph of uplift.
What not to do: introduce a new anecdote at 900 words - it will be underdeveloped and unconnected - or end on a moral ('and that is why we should cherish our families'), which reads as filler.
Then proofread for eight minutes, specifically for tense consistency (past narration drifting into present), comma splices and apostrophes. A missing conclusion can cost more than a stray comma ever will.