question 5 in AQA english language paper 1 is your chance to be creative there are two questions to choose from one based on a picture and one not based on a picture you choose one of the questions to answer and you should spend around 45 minutes on it the questions could be narrative writing a story or part of a story or descriptive but it's important to note that you won't always have a choice between the two types of writing as there might be two narrative or two descriptive questions so you need to be comfortable with both types of writing let's look at a typical question taken from the free sample paper which you can download at mr. broth calm a travel website is running a creative writing competition either describe a journey as suggested by this picture or write a story with the title the holiday twenty four marks for content and organization sixteen marks for technical accuracy 40 marks total so as you can see there are 40 marks available for this question that's half the marks of the entire paper being awarded for just one question with up to 24 marks available for a o5 and up to 16 marks available for a o6 now the key thing about this question is that it's your chance to be creative and original and the example don't want to see tons of answers which follow a formulaic approach so I don't want to give too many of those formulaic ideas in this video what I would like to do is to go over a couple of things people often don't think about number one use the techniques writers use in Section a many students don't realize it but in Section a of this exam you're asked to analyze a high-quality piece of fiction writing analyzing its use of language in question to structure in question three and a variety of methods in question four then in Section B here in question five you're asked to write your own high-quality piece of fiction writing so the point I'm trying to make is you should look to use the kinds of techniques you've analyzed in Section a not necessarily in the paper you're at that moment sitting I'm not saying you should copy anything from the source material but the skills and techniques the writer's methods that you've been studying all throughout a year when you're preparing for section a of this exam you should look to use those skills yourself in Section B for example aim to use some structural features in your writing why not have a flashback or a circular structure why not zoom in and out or shift in focus in a cinematic way to make your writing compelling those are the sorts of things you've looked at in question three of course and similarly with language use some of those language features you've been studying all year for question two pathetic fallacy metaphor simile that kind of thing the second thing is to remember that 16 marks are available for technical accuracy and this is something a lot of students don't think about but a little bit of preparation and planning can really help boost your marks for ao6 there are really two sides to technical accuracy one is making sure you don't have any mistakes so give yourself five minutes at the end to check your spelling punctuation and grammar and of course check your work as you're writing it as well there's plenty of time to stop and make sure you've got everything right the other side comes down to being ambitious in your use of technical skills so very sentence length and paragraph lengths use a range of sentence openings employ a wide variety of punctuation and here's something else most people don't realize these things don't happen automatically you have to remind yourself to do them as you're writing you have to consciously craft your answer and you've got time to do it because this is a forty-five minute question so if this was me I would probably in my plan draw out you know the eight different types of punctuation I want to use I might write you know cyclical structural or other things that I want to make sure I remember sentence length paragraph length and then as I'm writing my piece whether it's descriptive or narrative I might be halfway through paragraph one and look back at my plan where I've not just planned my content but the skills that aren't going to demonstrate and think hang on I haven't used much punctuation in this paragraph I'm going to use a semicolon and then tick it off the list hang on all my sentences are pretty similar in length I'm going to try and have a short sentence for effect actually stopping and pausing and looking back at your plan or thinking about the skills you want to demonstrate in your work as you're writing is so important for this question and you got the time to do it finally let's look at a sample paragraph ancient and wise the bull swishes his tail in the ice cold refreshing water creating zen-like ripples upon its calm surface the tails pendulum like motion as steady and synchronized as the most sophisticated of watch mechanisms mesmerizes the other creatures who seeking a moment's respite from the harsh unforgiving Sun have made the long slow pilgrimage to the watering hole this is heaven I hope you found this video useful if you'd like to see a longer video on this question then you can see one just here click on the screen and you'll be taken to that video please do subscribe to the channel