2011 Joelson Tang

Good advice for writing the composition

How many words to write?
In general, students in Primary 3 and 4 are required to write a minimum of 120 words, while
students in Primary 5 and 6 are required to write a minimum of 150 words. The number of
words given should serve as a guide how long we should write the composition. I recommend
that students in Primary 3 and 4 write up to a maximum of 200 words, while students in
Primary 5 and 6 up to a maximum of 250 words. Why?
One reason is that if you are a weak or an average student, writing more might only result in
more mistakes. Little good ideas are contributed, instead, more mistakes in spelling and
grammar would make it only more tempting for the marker to penalise you and give you less
marks than in the case you had written less.
Another reason would be that there may be parts of your composition which are quite
irrelevant to the topic you are writing about. You must show the link of each phrase and
sentence to the topic! If you fail to do so, the marker might just cross out those parts. For
example, if you write up to 200 words, but only 100 words have ideas that are relevant to the
topic, then it is as good as you writing 100 words only. The bad thing is that for the other 100
words whose ideas are irrelevant, the marker would look at the mistakes in grammar and
spelling you made and penalise you!
A third reason would be that you may not have enough time to write so much. After writing,
you should READ and RE-READ your composition to see how you could improve on your
first draft! You should look out for mistakes in spelling and grammar, as well as look for
ways to use better Vocabulary to bring out the effects of the scenarios you describe.
What you should be thinking and doing
Here are some good rules to observe:
- Before you start writing, do you really understand the scenario given, or the picture
you see?
- What are the events in the picture you have to write about, and some minor things that
can be linked to the main event?
- Try to write about an idea in as little number of words as possible
- From the start, have an idea how the whole story will flow: from the Introduction, the
Body to the Conclusion
- Ask yourself, is my Introduction too long? How can I make it more relevant?
- In the Body, what happened and what were the feelings of the characters? Can I
elaborate a little more?
- I should write in the PAST TENSE
- Is my story believable?
So lets get down to thinking of good ideas for our next composition, plan, and get down to
writing. Then let me edit your composition!
2011 Joelson Tang

An Incident you witnessed at the MRT Station







2011 Joelson Tang

Composition Planning Framework
Title: ________________________________________
Place(s):
Characters:
INTRODUCTION


BODY
Key events:
1.____________________________
Sub-event 1 Sub-event 2 Sub-event 3



2.____________________________
Sub-event 1 Sub-event 2 Sub-event 3



3.____________________________
Sub-event 1 Sub-event 2 Sub-event 3



CONCLUSION