NAPLAN writing prompts.

What does the NAPLAN writing prompt look like on the day?

Less than most people expect. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 receive a single prompt and a set time, and write one piece — a narrative or a persuasive text, depending on the year’s task. There is no choice of question, no stimulus booklet to work through, and nothing to have studied in advance. The prompt itself is usually short: an idea, an image or a statement, deliberately open enough that any student in the country can start from it. What the task asks and how it is marked goes through the criteria underneath it.

That shape is why the prompts below are bare. A practice prompt padded out with characters, a setting and a suggested plot is easier to write to and teaches the wrong reflex — on the day, the openness is the task.

How do you read a prompt in the first minute?

Three decisions, in this order, and then start writing. First: what is this actually about — not the topic, the point. A narrative prompt is a starting image, so the question is what changes by the end; a persuasive statement is a position, so the question is which side and why. Second: how small can it be. Most pieces that fail in a timed test fail because they were too big to finish, and a marker reads an unfinished piece as an unfinished piece. Third: what is the last line going to do. A writer who knows where the piece closes can spend the opening on something better than working out the plot.

Then stop planning. A minute or two is enough at this length; the writing is where the marks are, and a plan that runs to a quarter of the time is a plan that ate the piece.

The key.

Two words, and that is the whole gift. A prompt this bare is asking what a writer notices, so the first decision is not the plot but the object: whose key, to what, found where. The trap is a treasure hunt — a key, a hunt, a chest, an ending that arrives because the time ran out. A key that opens something ordinary, and matters anyway, is a better story and a shorter one.

Someone new arrived, and everything changed.

The prompt has already handed over the structure: before, arrival, after. What it has not handed over is scale, and that is where these go wrong. A new student, a new baby, a new neighbour — one room, two people, one thing that is different by the end — closes properly. A stranger who transforms a town does not close at all; it stops.

Two people remembered the same day differently.

This one rewards a writer who can hold two voices without announcing that they are doing it. The weak version alternates paragraphs and states the disagreement outright. The strong version lets the second account contradict the first in one detail and trusts the reader to catch it — which is also, incidentally, exactly what the cohesion criterion is looking at.

School should start later in the morning.

A statement a student has a real view on, which is the point. The weak response lists three reasons of equal weight and adds a rhetorical question. The strong one concedes the obvious objection early — parents leave for work before school starts — answers it, and spends the last paragraph on the argument it would actually defend out loud.

Phones should be banned in classrooms.

Almost every student has an opinion and a stock of borrowed arguments here, which is the danger: borrowed arguments read as borrowed. The response that lands is the one built from something the writer has seen. Notice too that the position matters less than whether the reasons hold — a marker is reading the argument, not agreeing with it.

Everybody should have to study a subject they are not good at.

A harder statement, and worth writing for that reason. It cannot be answered with a list, because the interesting case is the exception: which subject, for whom, and what is actually gained. A student who works out the limit of their own position and says so is writing at the top of the criteria, not hedging.