Writing Sample Paper Analysis - NSW Selective Test 2021

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Hi, my name is John and today I am going to do an analysis of the recently released writing exam sample paper. I will go through how students can best approach it to maximise their marks for the 2021 Writing component in the NSW Selective Exam.

It is likely that if these sample papers were out for years already, I probably wouldn’t explain it as students can usually come to the same conclusions and assumptions with the right time. However, with this new exam in March 2021, it will definitely save you a lot more time listening to someone who has been teaching for over five years as opposed to trying to figure it out by yourself or listen to someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.

 So, let’s get into it and read this question as there is a lot going on here. I am going to go through it once then go back to analyse each component and how you can structure your writing accordingly. I’ve seen other videos and material online which suggest that this is just your average persuasive writing, but it is not. It is very important for you as a parent or a student to make sure you are using critical thinking because if you are making decisions on bad advice or people who don’t fully know what they are talking about, you won’t get the results you want.

‘New to the area.  

Three new students have just arrived in your local area.

Your teacher has asked you to write an advice sheet for them, making them feel enthusiastic about coming to your school.

Write an advice sheet for the new students about how to get on well in your school and local area. ‘

By reading the first line – ‘three new students have just arrived in your local area’ we know from the beginning that an audience is a group of new students.

If it was just one student, we could have directed the language to an individual or even included a fictional name for them however since it is 3 new students who may be from entirely different backgrounds, it is important to be general with the points you write. A better example of this is if it was only one student and they were a female international exchange student from China. That would be vastly different from someone who is transferring locally within Australia into a school. Not just in the points you include but also in the terminology you write.

Therefore, we can frame the question to suit our preferences where in the introduction we can include that we are assuming they are all local students or they are all international students. If we try to cater to both or not mention it at all– it can be problematic and too broad as some international students depending on their year level may not even know English so would it even make sense for us to write an advice sheet with them as a key audience in the first place? Probably not.

If you don’t mention how old the students are or the location, as the ‘real’ reader, I may make an assumption that they are university students in America which in fact may be completely different to what you were going to write about.

The line ‘Your teacher has asked you to write an advice sheet for them…’, provides us with even more detailed information. There is also a line that can be interpreted differently but is there to mislead students. As it states that your teacher has asked you to write an advice sheet, some students may believe that the actual audience is the teacher instead of the new students.

Please don’t make this mistake. You may think there is not much difference however there is a clear distinction. If the actual audience is the teacher and this is an assignment to be submitted, you will write it with the conventions of an assignment, including details of who is the teacher, when was it submitted, when was it due and your name and class. However, as it is an advice sheet for students, it should not include these elements.

The second part of the line is ‘…making them feel enthusiastic about coming to your school.’ This tells us that the points you need to write about the need to be motivating and exciting. Maybe you can write a paragraph about the local history of the school, some exciting events that are unique to the school like a Gala or a school fair and something about how tight the students are with their teachers. It can be anything really as long as you back it up with the right examples with the PEEL formula which my last video was all about if you haven’t seen it already.

The last line in the question is ‘Write an advice sheet for the new students about how to get on well in your school and local area.’

This is the crux of the question – what is an advice sheet? There are a few online that you can actually refer to but it is essentially a page that gives you recommendations or advice on a certain topic. That is why this is largely a persuasive writing task however with an advice sheet, they do have headings and subheadings. If we go back to the very first line of the question it says ‘New to the Area’. We can reframe this as the heading or title of our writing piece by writing something like ‘New to the Area?’ and making it a rhetorical question.
The subheadings will be the 3 body paragraph points you will discuss however you will make them as small subheadings. So in your first body paragraph if you are going to write about the school’s history – the subheading can be ‘Leap into our past’ or ‘Get in touch with our roots’.

So to summarise, for every question you may get in writing you have to break down what they are exactly asking you to do. What format are they asking for and what are its conventions? Should you have headings, address it to someone specifically, date it or not? Who is the audience you are writing this for? These are great questions to help prompt you to know what to write so you can model your writing in the best way to maximise marks.

It is also interesting to note that my predictions were fairly on point regarding the upcoming changes. Namely, the test is 10 minutes longer from 20 minutes to 30 minutes. It is a different writing type compared to the traditional persuasive and narrative writing text types that have been asked previously which I also predicted. There is now a section for planning which wasn’t really there before in past papers. Also, the fact that the complexity of the question itself is more difficult compared to the past clearly shows that my predictions were pretty on point and we as a team at Bing’s Academy really know what we are talking about.

I will likely get some of my students in January to try this sample writing task for themselves and I can potentially share it or make a video on it if that is something that you are interested in. Totally optional but it is something I can do as all our classes are one on one so the overall quality for each student is quite high.

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