Descriptive Composition
Forty marks for one piece of writing, from a title and nothing else. No text to lean on, no reading credit to collect — and a quarter of the qualification riding on it.
What Section B asks
Four titles are offered: two descriptive, two narrative. You choose one, write 350–450 words, and every mark is a writing mark.
| Element | Detail | Marks |
|---|---|---|
| Choice | Four titles — two descriptive, two narrative. One is answered. | — |
| Length | About 350–450 words. | — |
| Content and structure | W1, W2 — a convincing picture, deliberately shaped. | W1 W2 |
| Style and accuracy | W3, W4, W5 — vocabulary, sentences, register, SPaG. | W3–W5 |
| Section B | All writing. No reading credit exists here. | 40 |
The line between description and narrative
This is the distinction the whole section turns on, and it is simpler than candidates fear. "The stallholder was packing up when he noticed the boy stealing an apple. He shouted. The boy ran…" is narrative — a problem, a change, a resolution, marked against descriptive criteria it cannot meet. "The stallholder packs by feel, without looking: crates stacked, awning cranked down, the last bruised apples going into a box he will not sell from tomorrow…" is description — things happen, but nothing changes; the interest is in the seeing, not the outcome. Description permits movement, people and even small events. What it does not permit is a plot: a problem introduced, escalated and resolved. If your piece has a turning point, you are writing the wrong thing.
Close observation
The highest-scoring descriptions are not the most decorated. They are the most noticed.
Specific beats beautiful, every time
| Decorated — says nothing | Observed — says one true thing |
|---|---|
| The beautiful, bustling market was full of a magnificent array of vibrant colours and delicious, mouth-watering smells that filled the crisp morning air. Six adjectives, no observation. | The fishmonger has rewritten the price of the mackerel three times since eight, each figure lower than the last, the chalk ghosting the numbers underneath. One specific noticing — it carries the hour, the trade and the desperation without naming any of them. |
Four questions that generate real detail
01 What is worn, broken, or repaired? Objects carry history — a mended awning says more than a described one. 02 What sound is nobody listening to? The background is where truth hides — a generator, a radio, a shutter. 03 What is someone doing without thinking? Habitual gesture reveals character faster than any adjective. 04 What is slightly wrong? One discordant detail makes a scene real, because real scenes are never tidy.
Figurative language, used honestly
The mark scheme requires it. But a metaphor exists to make something clearer, not to prove you know what a metaphor is. Test any image against one question: does this help me see the thing more exactly? "Ghosting" passes — it carries the faint, half-erased, haunted quality of the earlier price in a single word. "The market was a hive of activity" fails; it replaces a real scene with a cliché the examiner has read ninety times before lunch.
Varieties of focus
The Cambridge criteria name this explicitly. It is one of the few places where the mark scheme tells you, in plain words, exactly what to do.
| Focus | What it does | Its danger |
|---|---|---|
| Wide | Establishes the scene and its scale. Orients the reader. | Generic. Every market is busy; every street is dark. Get out quickly. |
| Close | One object, one gesture, one sound, held long enough to become strange. | Airless if sustained. The reader loses the scene. |
| Inward | What the watcher makes of it — the meaning, the memory, the unease. | Sentimental if unearned. It must come from a detail, not instead of one. |
Worked example — one paragraph, three distances
"Describe a market at closing time." [Wide] By six the aisles have emptied of everyone but the traders, and the hall has begun to sound like a building again rather than a crowd — echo returning, footsteps audible, the roof suddenly very high. [Close] The fishmonger scrapes ice from the counter with the side of his hand, over and over, long after the counter is clean. [Inward] He is not tidying. He is simply not yet ready to go home, and I recognise the gesture, because my grandfather made it every night for eleven years with a cloth and an empty till.
Wide → close → inward, in three sentences, and the whole paragraph is one continuous observation, not three separate ones. The wide shot makes the emptiness available; the close shot finds one man inside it; the inward turn tells us why the watcher stopped to look. Reverse the order and the paragraph collapses.
Structuring a description
A description must go somewhere without having a plot. This sounds impossible. It is not — it simply means the reader must change, rather than the events.
Three structures that work
01 The clock — move through time (the market at five, at six, at seven); the scene empties, and the emptying is the shape. 02 The walk — move through space, letting the observer’s attention travel; each stop is a close-up, the movement between them the structure. 03 The return — open on an image, close on the same image, changed by what the reader now knows; the most controlled option, and the most impressive when it works.
Planning, in four minutes
Do not plan a plot. Plan a sequence of noticings, and mark where the focus shifts.
| Paragraph | Focus | The noticing |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wide | The hall becoming a building again. Echo returning. |
| 2 | Close | The fishmonger’s rewritten prices. Chalk ghosting. |
| 3 | Close → inward | Scraping the clean counter. Why he is not leaving. |
| 4 | Wide | The lights going out in sections, the hall shrinking. |
| 5 | Return | The echo again — but now it belongs to someone. |
Five paragraphs, roughly eighty words each. The last closes the loop the first opened. That is 400 words, and the structure was decided before a single sentence was written.
Exam advice
Common mistakes
Model answer
Recall checklist
- State the mark total of Section B and confirm no reading marks exist there.
- Distinguish description from narrative using the presence of a plot.
- Identify the four questions that generate close observation.
- Explain why a specific detail outperforms a beautiful one.
- Describe the three distances and the danger of each.
- Apply the wide → close → inward sequence to any scene.
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