What is a difficult stimulus?

[dermite]

Hi there,
I've heard many people on here talking about easy stimuli and hard stimuli for the creative section
I don't really understand the difference between the two, so I was wondering,
-> What makes a stimulus hard or easy?
->Does it depend on the flexibility/adaptability of your creative you've written over the year? Surely a stimulus should be hard for one student's story but easy for another?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, and I thank you all in advance!

[Mada438]

Hi there,
I've heard many people on here talking about easy stimuli and hard stimuli for the creative section
I don't really understand the difference between the two, so I was wondering,
-> What makes a stimulus hard or easy?
->Does it depend on the flexibility/adaptability of your creative you've written over the year? Surely a stimulus should be hard for one student's story but easy for another?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, and I thank you all in advance!

Whether the stimuli is easy or hard is subjective. What seems hard to someone, seems easy to another. It really just comes down to your creative writing ability, the way you formulate your ideas, how you interpret the stimulus (both visual and written prompts) and the flexibility of both your mind to adapt to previously unimagined situations as as well as the flexibility of your story to change and be shaped by the syllabus.
Personally, i find most stimulus easy, most people find them hard because they take them so literally. Try to think outside of the box. For example i got a picture last year (i dont remember what the picture was, but i remember my whole class struggled with it) but it included lots of shades of purple, so instead of focusing on the salient objects in the photo, i merely made everything in my story purple (because the picture was purple) and that was enough to satisfy the marker

Let me know if you need any further clarification!

[angewina_naguen]

Hi there,
I've heard many people on here talking about easy stimuli and hard stimuli for the creative section
I don't really understand the difference between the two, so I was wondering,
-> What makes a stimulus hard or easy?
->Does it depend on the flexibility/adaptability of your creative you've written over the year? Surely a stimulus should be hard for one student's story but easy for another?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, and I thank you all in advance!

Hey, there!

My biggest fears in this upcoming HSC are one of two things for the creative writing;

They specify a particular type of creative response we have to provide- God forbid they ask us to write a speech if we prepared a short story, or a short story if we prepared a speech because I know a few people who are planning to write speeches for the creative section. I think practising to adapt your creative into different creative forms might make you more confident with whatever they could throw at you. The likelihood of this happening is slim but it would definitely be wise to think of alternate ways to represent Discovery, especially considering all the different forms on the prescribed list! There's like one past paper where I've seen it happen, where they asked to write specifically a speech, but I think it was for a trials exam. Better safe than sorry!

They ask to start or end with a quote- This happened with my Preliminary exam where we were given three quotes and had to use them as the beginning or ending of the story. My story had NOTHING to do when any of them so as I was writing it I slightly changed my ending so that it flowed into the quote appropriately. Conversely, you could change the beginning and then lead your story back to how you intended to end it.

Those would be my ways to make sure you prepare yourself for any possibilities with a stimulus. The best way to practise would be to write out your story under exam conditions with a different stimulus each time. If you don't have the time for that, you can do what I do and just look at past papers, formulate a plan in your head of how you would adapt to it in an exam situation and write a plan giving yourself five minutes.

I hope this helps and good luck 

Angelina