AQA English Language Paper 1 Question 5: How to Write a Description

You had forty-five minutes and you used all of them. The sky was described. There were similes. You reached for every impressive word you own — and the mark came back in the middle, with “more detail” or “develop your ideas” written underneath, which tells you nothing you can act on.

Question 5 on Paper 1 is the largest block of marks on that paper, and it is the one students are least often taught. Reading questions get modelled in lessons because they have right answers. Writing gets set as homework and marked with a comment.

The short answer

Paper 1 Question 5 is worth 40 marks — half of Paper 1. You choose one of two tasks, usually a description suggested by a picture or a piece of narrative writing. Twenty-four marks are for content and organisation, and sixteen are for technical accuracy. You have around forty-five minutes.

What is actually being marked

Two assessment objectives, and they pull in slightly different directions.

AO5, worth 24 marks, is for communicating clearly and imaginatively, and for organising your writing. This is where the shape of the piece lives — whether it goes somewhere, whether the paragraphs are doing separate jobs, whether a reader is held.

AO6, worth 16 marks, is for vocabulary and sentence structures, and for spelling and punctuation. Note that vocabulary sits here, alongside accuracy. A precise word is credited in the same place as a correctly used semicolon, and the two are judged together — which is why ambition that comes with frequent error costs more than it earns.

Sixteen marks out of forty is not a detail. It is the difference between two grades, and it is the half most students treat as a proofread if there is time.

The other thing worth knowing: your answer is placed in a level on the overall impression it gives, then fine-tuned within it. There is no tally of devices. Adding a fourth simile does not add a fourth mark.

Description or narrative — choose properly

You get two options and about thirty seconds to pick.

Take the description if you are not confident you can finish a story. Description has no plot to resolve, so it cannot collapse at the end, and it is far easier to control in forty-five minutes. Most students who run out of time chose narrative.

Take the narrative only if you have a small idea, not a big one. A whole life will not fit. One afternoon might.

Either way, the picture is a prompt, not an instruction. You are asked for writing suggested by it. You do not have to inventory everything in the frame, and the strongest answers rarely try.

A method

1. Find one controlling idea before you write. Not a subject — an idea about the subject. Not “an empty beach” but “a place still running with nobody left to watch it”. Everything then has something to belong to.

2. Plan four or five paragraphs, each with a different job. Give them positions: close up, wide, a person, a shift in time. Write the positions in the margin. That is your whole plan.

3. Decide your last line before your first. If you know where you are landing you can steer, and you will not simply stop when the time goes.

4. Write specifically, not decoratively. Two precise nouns beat five adjectives. The instinct to describe more is nearly always wrong; the fix is to describe exactly.

5. Leave five minutes to read it back. Slowly. Almost nobody does this and everybody who does gains marks.

A worked example

Imagine the picture is a seaside amusement arcade at dusk, out of season, with the tide a long way out. The task: write a description suggested by this picture.

A weaker opening

The beautiful golden sun was setting slowly over the calm blue sea like a big orange ball. The old abandoned arcade stood there silently, its bright colourful lights flickering ominously in the cold dark night. It was as quiet as a mouse. The freezing wind whispered eerily through the empty deserted streets, sending shivers down my spine. It was a scary and mysterious place that made me feel uneasy and alone.

The effort is obvious and it is all going the wrong way. Almost every noun has two adjectives bolted to it, so nothing stands out — when everything is emphasised, nothing is. “Like a big orange ball”, “quiet as a mouse” and “shivers down my spine” are phrases the reader has met a thousand times, which means they carry no picture at all. And there is no idea underneath it, so the paragraph could be reordered at random without losing anything.

A stronger version

The arcade had been shut for an hour and the machines had not been told. Behind the glass a claw hung open above a heap of pink bears, and a screen ran its demonstration loop for nobody — three cars taking the same corner, over and over, at a speed no one was going to beat now.

Outside, the tide had gone a long way out. It had left the flat grey shine it always leaves, and a gull stood in the middle of it doing nothing at all.

A woman came along the front with a dog and a carrier bag and did not look up at any of it. She had seen it every evening for eleven years.

That is how a season ends. Not with the lights going off, but with them staying on a little longer than there is anyone to see them.

Why the second version scores higher

It has one idea and everything serves it. Things continuing without an audience: the machines, the demo loop, the gull, the woman who no longer looks, the lights. Four paragraphs, one argument. That is organisation, and organisation is explicitly credited.

It is specific rather than decorative. “A heap of pink bears” does more than “colourful prizes”. “Three cars taking the same corner” does more than “flashing screens”. Notice how few adjectives there are — the work is being done by nouns and verbs, which is where description actually lives.

It moves. Inside the glass, then out to the tide, then to a person, then a step back. Each paragraph changes the distance. The weak version stands still.

The sentences vary because the writing needs them to. Long, accumulating sentences carry the middle; the short last pair lands it. That variety is straightforwardly part of the sixteen accuracy marks.

It ends deliberately. The final two sentences reframe everything before them. Compare that to a piece that stops because the clock did.

Nothing in it is a phrase you have read before. No golden orb, no eerie silence, no shivers. That alone separates it from most of the pile.

Where the marks usually go

Adjective stacking. Two or three adjectives per noun reads as unedited, not ambitious. Cut to one, and make it exact.

Clichés. “Deafening silence”, “heart pounding”, “like a ton of bricks”. Familiar phrasing signals that a writer reached for the nearest thing rather than looking at the scene. If you have heard it before, so has the examiner, forty times that morning.

Describing the picture instead of using it. Listing what is in the frame produces an inventory. You were asked for writing suggested by it.

Starting a story you cannot finish. A narrative that abandons itself at the climax loses the top band, because the top band depends on a shape.

Accuracy left to the end. Missing full stops, comma splices, tense slips. Sixteen marks are not recoverable in a two-minute skim.

Reaching for a word that is nearly right. “Effulgent” used wrongly costs more than “bright” used well. Frequency of error outweighs ambition every time.

Three to practise

Twenty minutes each. Two paragraphs, properly built, is enough to learn from.

1. Write a description suggested by this: a kitchen at six in the morning, one light on, nobody in it yet.

2. Write the opening of a story that begins: The key still worked, which surprised her.

3. Write a description suggested by this: a bus station in heavy rain, mid-afternoon, half the departure boards blank.

For each one, write your controlling idea at the top before you start. If you cannot say it in six words, you are not ready to write.

If this is the gap costing you marks

Most students whose description comes back marked “more detail” can see the scene perfectly well. The problem is that the exact word for that grey, that texture, that particular noise was not available at the moment they needed it, so they modified a general word instead and the sentence went flat.

That is a supply problem, not a talent problem, and it is fixable. Ambitious Vocabulary — Book 5 is the descriptive-writing book in the series, built entirely around the senses: colour and light, texture and surface, sound and smell, weather, landscape and water — including a unit on describing one sense in the language of another. Twelve units, around 240 words, with model descriptions rather than one-word answer keys.

It is one of eleven workbooks, each built for a different gap. You do not need all of them — start with the one costing you the most marks.

For the broader picture, what I see going wrong on Question 5 when I mark it covers timing, planning and endings across both papers. And there are free resources including a vocabulary sampler with full answers and no email address required.

In short

Question 5 rewards control, not decoration. Find one idea before you write, give four or five paragraphs one job each, choose exact nouns over stacked adjectives, decide your ending first, and treat the sixteen accuracy marks as part of the writing rather than a check at the end.

Then take one of the three prompts above and write only the first paragraph. Getting the opening sixty words right is most of this question.