Choosing and drafting your selection
What you submit
- A selection of writing — the Explanatory Notes specify at least two pieces. Two is the minimum, not the target.
- The pieces are assessed individually, so a strong piece does not compensate for a weak one, and the work must be primarily your own, developed through drafting your teacher can see.
Forms, and what each is good for
- Reflective or personal — strongest for dimensions or viewpoints, because you can hold your past and present selves at once. Risk: biography feels like a reason for material to belong.
- Formal essay or argument — strongest for develops and structures, but a settled position cannot develop. Creative writing is strongest for integration; its risk is plot competing with idea.
Choosing a range, and choosing subjects
- Range across form is the obvious axis and the weakest: two forms proves you can do two forms. Better axes: distance (one close to your experience, one outside it), purpose (one that shows, one that argues), structure and register. Do not force a link between the pieces.
- The subject decides the ceiling. Three tests before committing:
- Can you state a version you disagree with, and make it sound reasonable?
- Can you name someone who experienced it differently?
- Is there a fact about it that surprises you?
- Narrow beats large. Not climate change but one road, one season, one council decision. New Zealand material is worth choosing deliberately — a named town, a specific industry.
- Write your purpose in one sentence at the top of the page. I want the reader to end up unsure whether my grandfather was sad. Stated that precisely, it is a test you can apply to every paragraph.
One job per draft
- A draft that tries to fix everything fixes sentences, because sentences are the easiest of the three things to fix.
- The sequence:
- Draft 1 — get it down, fixing nothing.
- Draft 2 — ideas. Apply the first-and-last test; if it fails, restructure before anything else.
- Draft 3 — structure. Apply the reorder test to every adjacent pair.
- Draft 4 — cut 10 per cent. Draft 5 — sentences: rhythm, precision, referents.
- Final — conventions, a separate pass, done last and done cold.
- Draft 2 is the Level 3 addition, and working on sentences before it is done is the commonest waste of time in this standard — invisible, because the work feels productive, and self-defeating, because polished paragraphs are the hardest to delete. Draft 2 usually shortens the piece, and that is nearly always a sign it is improving.
Cutting, conventions and authenticity
- Cutting is the only revision that improves fluency, density and sustaining at once. Set the target as a number in advance and cut in this order: paragraphs that fail the belongs test; explanations of what is already shown; repeated examples; adverbs propping up weak verbs. It can be overdone: if you are cutting concrete detail, cut a claim instead.
- Treat conventions as a gate. Errors beyond the minor cost you Achieved regardless of everything else. Do the pass separately, last and cold: read backwards sentence by sentence so you see words rather than meaning, and check macrons, because Māori place names carry them and approximating is an error.
- Feedback that identifies problems is legitimate; feedback that supplies solutions is not. The middle sags is fine; another person rewriting your sentences is not, and neither is a tool. Your drafts are the evidence that the piece is yours, so keep every version, dated.
Worked Example
Worked Example
A student is choosing two pieces. They have four candidates, written for this page.
Choose two, and justify the choice.
Answer:
Step 1 — apply the three subject tests.
| Disagreeable version? | Someone who saw it differently? | A surprising fact? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A grandmother | No — the view is settled and everyone shares it | Not without inventing one | No |
| B supermarket | Yes — the town needed the jobs | Yes — the people who wanted it | Yes, if researched |
| C father leaving | Fiction, so the writer supplies both sides and can rig them | The father, if written seriously | Not applicable |
| D tyre shop | Yes — it was just a job | Yes — the men there twenty years | Yes: what the work consists of |
A fails two of three — not because the subject is unworthy, but because the writer has one settled position and everyone in the material shares it.
Step 2 — test concreteness in one minute. A: the hospital, the drive home — both generic. B: the hearing date, the submissions read out, the carpark's footprint. C: invented, so unlimited — nothing constrains it, so nothing forces specificity. D: the pressure gauge, the eleven-dollar tread depth check, the man who could tell a make by the wear pattern.
Step 3 — choose, and check the range. Choose D and B. D is reflective, close in, and shows; B is an argument, wide, and argues — range across four axes, not one. And both have a second viewpoint identified before drafting: the men at the tyre shop, and the submitters who wanted the supermarket.
Step 4 — say what is lost. Candidate A can be written, but not yet, and not for this — two years is not enough for the writer to have a second view of their own grief.