Assessment Descriptors

These are what the examiners have at their elbow when they mark your work. They say things like:

“plot and characterisation are developed with detail, originality and imagination”

They are pretty much the same for all the boards – the above comes from AQA and WJEC. So what does it mean?

How to meet the descriptors

It’s imaginative to see one thing in terms of another. In the example below, I’m going to see moving people as moving water. You know the sort of thing: rivers of people Christmas shopping in the High Street, a sea of faces. But those are cliche, not original. And I want to show imagination, originality and detail – lots of detail. Let’s take it step by step.

Generate a vocabulary

Write a list of words that describe how water moves. Use a thesaurus to add to your list but best to use only words you have already heard of. This way you’re bound to use words that you might not have used without a little bit of planning.

Now use them to describe sunlight entering a room.

Here’s my list:

Ooze, lap, lick, wash, splash, soak, saturated, bathe, shower, infuse, sluice, swamp, overflow, spill, slop, drop, leak, drip, sprinkle, spatter, sweat, baptize

And here’s my example:

The early morning sunlight leaked under the curtain, flowed over the windowsill and saturated the duvet cover.

Inadvertently I’ve also hit another top level assessment descriptor: the triplet (leaked, flowed, saturated) constitutes a complex structure and is a developed idea, two top band criteria at Key Stage 4.

Using the elements

The trick here is to describe one element (earth, fire, air and water) in terms of another. Rather than earth, I think it works better to use words that describe things growing in the earth (The flood sprouted from the broken pipe, branched in rivers over the floor, germinating localised disasters: the fallen phone, dropped address book, scattered laundry, Grandad himself lying there, like a fallen tree  . . )

Meeting more than one descriptor

Here’s another example: people on a railway station described in terms of water. Now we’ve got imagination, detail, originality, complex structure and a range of punctuation. The word ‘sluiced’ is an example of a ‘correct’ spelling of a ‘complex irregular word’ – so too, perhaps, ‘businessmen.’ All top band descriptors. None of this happens by accident. Take a model sentence, imitate it, vary it: then its original. It’s yours. 

Example

The platform was flooded with people: tourists flowed through the turnstiles; businessmen oozed from the train doors; the elderly leaked from the escalators; children, bright in their school uniforms were sluiced down the escalators; and, a pool of rags and human limbs stagnated by a refuse bin.

More ideas

If you have a pattern, it can be effective to introduce a contrast in the last element; so, above still water contrasts with the moving water that precedes it and a noun, pool, contrasts with the verbs, flooded, flowed, oozed, leaked, sluiced.

Try it with animal words

Sunlight snuffled the curtain edges, growled under the door, pawed to be let into the house.

Try horse, cat or insect words – or any other animal. And then see if you can come up with ideas of your own.