Some advice to face writing tasks (Trinity Exams)

In previous posts, I have given you some advice to face the reading tasks .Now it is the turn of the writing tasks. In the new Trinity exams, there are two compulsory writing tasks: task 3 – reading into writing and task 4 extended writing.

Although producing a piece of writing may not seem very difficult for some, you have to take into account Trinity standards and assessment criteria.

Let’s see some steps that you can follow and put them into practice with an example. 

1. Read the texts carefull
2. Read the task carefully.   
3. Make sure you know:

• Writing type (article/ essay/ letter/ email/ review) 
• Style (formal/ informal/neutral)  
• Topic  
• Things you must write about.

4. Decide which information you are going to include in each paragraph.

5. Decide in which text you have the information you need.

6. Write the ideas that you have chosen from the text.

7. Write your composition.

8. Pay attention to the grammar you need to use and the assessment criteria




To put all this advice into practice, we are going to use the following example.

The wording of the task is the following:

Write an article for your school magazine (100–130 words) about doing sports in the gym. Use the information you read in Task 2 (pages 4–6) to:

- explain why it is good to do sports

- offer some alternatives to exercising in the gym

- give some examples of exercises we can do



After reading carefully the texts and the tasks, we go directly to step 3. In this step, we have to see what type of composition we are writing (article, essay, letter, email, review, report…), the style (formal, informal or neutral), what is the topic of the composition and, finally, what do you have to write about.

In the example above, we are writing an article, in a neutral style since it is for a school magazine, the topic is about doing sports in the gym and you must write about why it is good to do sports, give some alternatives to the gym and finally provide some examples of exercises.

Once we have done this, we are ready to continue to step 4 in which we are going to divide the information into paragraphs and we have “the skeleton” of our composition.

Our planning notes could be something similar to the image you have below

 

In step 5, we complete these notes a little bit, by looking for the information we are going to use in each paragraph and identify in which text we have it.
 
We are almost finishing our planning for task 3. Now we are going to include in our notes the specific information we will include in our writing. Your planning notes should look similar to the ones below.
 
 

Now, you are ready to start writing your composition. First, write it quickly and then, once it is finished, revise it to check the grammar and the structure of our writing taking into account Trinity standards and assessment criteria.
 
Here you have an example of composition that covers all this criteria mentioned above. Doing exercise in the gym

Doing sports has a lot of benefits for our health. For example, it helps us reduce the risk of suffering some chronic diseases, cancer, diabetes and obesity among others. The best option to exercise is going to the gym, but some people prefer other alternatives because the gym is expensive and sometimes far from your house.

If you don’t like going to the gym, you can do some simple activities that might be included in your daily life at home or in the park as walking the dog, use the stairs, use the free exercise machines and the mountain climber.

To conclude, everyone must do exercise because it’ll make you feel better. If you don’t like going to the gym, the alternatives offered are a good option.

Words: 127/130


The same steps can be followed to do task 4, except now, you do not have to use the information in the four texts of the previous tasks.

I hope all these posts containing advice for the Trinity exams have been useful for you.