Sutton Boys' Second Stage English Mock Paper 6

Viewpoint writing is not the same as retelling. Nell has given you the outside of the evening, and everything she reports is fixed: the trumpet under the arm, the name called twice, the camera in the third row, the red neck, the two words, the fire door, the car park, the interval, the grandmother singing. Your job is to supply the inside, and to leave the outside exactly where she left it. Any answer that has Theo play brilliantly, or that moves the fire door to the end, has failed the largest band on the paper before the writing is even judged.

The whole task turns on one question: why would a boy who has practised, carried his trumpet to the hall and stood in the wings refuse to walk on? You do not have to give the reader the answer in a sentence. In fact the instruction tells you not to. You show it. Perhaps he can hear that the hall has gone quiet in the wrong way. Perhaps the camera is the problem, not the audience. Perhaps he played this piece for somebody who is not in the room tonight. Choose one reason, and let it surface in a memory, an object, or the thing he notices when everybody else is noticing him.

The best trick available to you is to take Nell's outside details and give them their inside. She saw the back of his neck go red; he feels his collar turn into a hand. She saw him push the trumpet at her and say two words; he hears his own voice come out flat and wrong and knows immediately that he has just given his sister a problem. She saw him come back at the interval; he can tell you about the twenty minutes in the car park that she never witnessed, which is the one stretch of the evening where you are free.

Three things regularly cost marks. Writing Nell's paragraph again with the pronouns swapped shows no understanding of viewpoint at all. Opening with a sentence such as I refused to go on stage because I was too nervous throws away the whole piece in one line, because the reader now has nothing to discover. And making Theo either a villain or a hero flattens him; the interesting version is a boy who cannot fully explain it to himself either.

Timing: spend seven minutes planning, and use them on the reason and on where it appears rather than on the events, which are already decided for you. Write for around twenty-eight minutes. Leave five minutes to check that you have not slipped into the third person anywhere and that the events still match the extract line by line.