Editing, Situational Writing and Continuous Writing carry 70 marks and 35% of the English grade in one 1 hour 50 minute sitting. Here is what each section actually rewards.
By Marcus Toh · 2026-04-22
The English Language 1184 syllabus sets Paper 1 as a single 1 hour 50 minute sitting worth 70 marks, and the design matters: three sections that reward three different skills, so a student can be strong in one and bleed marks in another without anyone noticing until the grade lands.
| Section | Marks | What your child must do |
|---|---|---|
| A: Editing | 10 | Find and correct grammatical errors in a text of up to 250 words |
| B: Situational Writing | 30 | Write 250 to 350 words (an email, letter, report or speech) responding to a situation with a visual text |
| C: Continuous Writing | 30 | Write 350 to 500 words on one of four topics, narrative or argument among them |
The editing section tests grammar only. The syllabus states that punctuation and spelling errors will not be tested, which surprises most parents, because students habitually hunt for missing commas and lose the actual subject verb agreement error sitting in the same line. Ten easy marks for the student trained to look for the right category of mistake, and a quiet leak for everyone else.
Situational Writing is marked on how well the response suits its purpose, audience and context, which means the marks are decided before the first elegant sentence, in the two minutes where the student works out who they are writing to and why. A beautifully written email to the wrong audience scores worse than a plain one that nails the register and covers every required point from the visual.
Continuous Writing offers four topics and demands only one, and the topic choice is itself a skill. The strongest essay is almost always the one where the student has something true to say, a real experience or a genuinely held argument, rather than the topic that looked most impressive. The word band of 350 to 500 words also means discipline: long enough to develop one idea properly, too short to develop three.
Paper 1 is half the writing story. The other 1 hour 50 minute sitting, Paper 2, carries 50 marks of comprehension including the summary task, and we break that down in the 80-word summary guide. And since the papers reward directness, the same instinct we teach for the oral, answer the question first, applies on paper too.
Most students revise Paper 1 by writing more essays, and most of them are polishing the section that was already their strongest. Look at the split honestly instead: Editing and Situational Writing together carry 40 marks, more than the composition itself, and they are the trainable sections, the ones where knowing the game converts directly into marks.
After three years of tutoring I can tell you where the quiet leaks are, the student who hunts commas in Section A, the one who writes gorgeous prose to the wrong audience in Section B. Fixing those is faster than raising an essay grade, so if the exam is months away, spend the next fortnight on the 40 marks nobody practises, then go back to the compositions with the easy marks already banked.
The 1184 syllabus weights the four papers as Writing 35%, Comprehension 35%, Listening 10% and Oral Communication 20%, so Paper 1 and Paper 2 together decide 70% of the grade, and the two papers are sat back to back on the same day in the year end season.
Paper 3 Listening is 30 marks in about 45 minutes, split 22 marks of listening tasks and an 8 mark note taking task. Paper 4 Oral is 30 marks over about 20 minutes including 10 minutes of preparation, split evenly between the Planned Response and the Spoken Interaction at 15 marks each.
No. The syllabus caps it at not more than 250 words of continuous prose, with corrections written in spaces provided, so the whole section is designed to be done briskly and should not eat into the time the two writing tasks need.