Rajesh Patel Page 1 of 2

My Ela’s First Letter to Me

Date -
Dear __________________________,

I am writing to inform you about your writing; the good, the bad and the ugly in it and how to make it better.

Only one of you could not send me the review because of the alleged technical reasons. So, this report
pertains to those 15 students who did email me their responses.

Overall the writing task was accessible to all of you. It was your first attempt to move your writing from
‘freestyle’ to ‘controlled’ and naturally it elicited a wide range of differentiated responses.

Most of you were able to write the title, name and pun as per the specifications set while very few could not
do so! All the students were able to write in four different paragraphs. In your first response to the extended
writing task only 2 out 16 were able to do some paragraphing. Now, all 16 did. Well done!

A very large number of students wrote as per most of the baseline criteria (those descriptors for the four
paragraphs). However, in the first attempt as well as in the subsequent ones, not a single person was able to
adhere to all the standards. Most of you still wrote something else other than what is asked in the question.
It means you still do not read all the parts of the question carefully or fail to understand them; and if you do
understand, you just do not care to stick to them.

Most responses were well written and maintained coherent narrative to a great extent but very few
responses were quite engaging, interesting and lively. However, all of you gave away too much information
leaving nothing or just little to the readers’ imagination. Two pupils just wrote the story of the movie not
answering any parts of the question. Non-compliance to the question also arose for those who just copied
from the Internet because they could not edit ready-made writing to suit the requirement of the question!
Only two candidates used figurative language, i.e., figures of speech such as metaphor and simile, but
idiomatic expressions were almost completely absent. Only one student’s writing was difficult to understand
in a couple of sentences, that is, all the other writing was readable. Overall language, however, was not
always written for the purpose and audience of the movie review.

Two students wrote in just phrases and not complete sentences in many pockets of their response. Very few
forgot to put punctuation after each sentence but with one student this problem is too much. Some typed
the first letter of the proper noun small while few others unnecessarily typed all letters capital. Most of the
candidates were successful to demonstrate accuracy across their chosen range of spelling, punctuation and
syntactic structures however in most of the responses the range of sentence structure was not sufficiently
varied. It was comforting to see that there was no ‘commentable’ problem with tenses and subject-verb
agreement. Only two or three students made very few spelling mistakes.

Writing was of exceptional quality, though mostly not matching the pre-defined criteria, in those parts which
were directly ‘hijacked’ from the Internet with proceeding and succeeding parts going steeply downwards on
quality index indicating them to be yours own.

Most of you found it difficult to write 500 words though a couple of you asked for more.
 Rajesh Patel Page 2 of 2

Now, as per this letter, figure out which positive and negative features reflect your writing. Do this in the
table below. This will help you to know what you need to improve in your writing. I am sure you have
capacity to do this. Just that you need to keep practising, reflect on it, get feedback and act on it.

Lots of love!

Your Ela

Analysis of my Writing
What is good in my writing What I need to improve