Question 5 is worth 40 marks. That is half of the paper, in 45 minutes, and it is the question students prepare for least. Most of the marks that get lost are not lost because a student cannot write. They are lost for reasons that have nothing to do with talent.
I mark these papers. Here is what I see, over and over.
1. Arriving at Question 5 with no time left
Section A is worth 40 marks and Section B is worth 40 marks. Students spend an hour on Section A because the questions are in front of them and feel answerable, then give Question 5 whatever is left.
A rushed Question 5 does not just lose a few marks. It loses the whole top band, because the top band depends on structure, and structure depends on having enough time to build one.
Set a hard stop. When 45 minutes remain, you move, finished or not.
2. No plan, so no shape
Five minutes of planning feels like five minutes wasted. It is the highest-return five minutes in the exam.
Without a plan, writing drifts. A description starts at a beach, wanders to a memory of a grandmother, arrives somewhere unrelated, and stops when time runs out. The examiner sees material, not a piece of writing.
A plan does not need to be neat. Four or five bullet points down the margin, one per paragraph, with a note of where you want to end. That is enough to keep a piece pointing in one direction.
3. Endings that are not endings
An enormous number of scripts simply stop. The pen runs out of time and the paragraph breaks off.
Decide your last line before you write your first one. If you know where you are going, you can steer towards it and land the piece even when you are short of time. A deliberate ending, even a plain one, reads as controlled. A piece that stops mid-thought reads as unfinished, and it is marked as unfinished.
4. Technical accuracy quietly draining marks
Sixteen of the forty marks are for technical accuracy. That is not a rounding error, it is a grade.
What costs marks here is frequency, not severity. A student who writes ambitiously and makes an error every second line will score lower on accuracy than a student who writes plainly and makes very few. Both may be trying equally hard. Only one has kept the mark.
If you are unsure how to punctuate a sentence, you can nearly always write it a different way that you are sure of. That is not cowardice, it is control.
5. Paragraphs used as decoration
Paragraphs should mark a shift of time, place, focus, speaker or idea. Instead they often appear every eight lines or so because the page looks wrong otherwise, or they do not appear at all.
A page of unbroken text is the single fastest way to signal that a piece is unstructured. Even strong content struggles to climb out of that.
6. Description that is trying too hard
Three similes in one sentence do not read as ambitious. They read as unedited.
The top band rewards writing that is crafted, and crafting includes restraint, knowing which image to keep and which to cut. One precise image, given room, does more than four competing ones. When every noun has two adjectives bolted to it, nothing stands out, because everything is shouting.
7. On Paper 2, ignoring form, audience and purpose
Paper 2 Question 5 names the form, tells you who it is for, and tells you what it is meant to do. A letter to a headteacher, an article for a broadsheet, a speech to a local council.
Students write the same essay regardless. The mark scheme does not reward that. A letter needs to look and sound like a letter. A speech needs to acknowledge a room. Matching the brief is not a formality, it is where a large share of the marks live.
8. Not reading it back
Five minutes at the end, reading slowly, will catch missing full stops, dropped words, tense slips and the sentence that made sense in your head and nowhere else.
Almost nobody does it. Everybody who does it gains marks.
What actually moves the grade
Not vocabulary. Not more devices. Control, of time, of structure, of accuracy.
The students who jump a grade on Question 5 are usually students who started planning, started finishing properly, and stopped writing sentences they could not punctuate. None of that requires natural flair. All of it can be practised.
If Question 5 is where your marks are going, Transactional Writing — Study Guide & Workbook works through form, audience and purpose with model responses that show the reasoning, not just the answer. The Practice Papers packs give you exam-timed writing tasks to try it on.
If the grade behind all this was a 3, there is a prior question worth settling first: whether to resit in November or wait for the summer, and what to ask the school before either. Got a grade 3 in GCSE English? Here is what to do next covers the deadlines, the numbers nobody mentions, and the four gaps that cost most of the marks.