What are your top exam tips for the longer writing question?

The main two tips I would give for the 150 word question are as follows: Read the questions at least twice and underline any key words.As there is a choice between two questions for this section, it is a good idea to make sure you understand what you are being asked to do for each one so that you can pick the one that suits you best. Underlining key words will help you focus on the points to make in your answer to ensure they are relevant. It is also important to check what tense the question is asking you to use. For example, in a past exam, the question was about a memorable day that you have had at school. This means that a past tense form was needed. Make a mini-plan.Quickly bullet pointing ideas is a good way of ensuring that you cover each of the things you are asked to write about. It also ensures that you don't veer off into talking about irrelevant material, or significantly go over the word limit as this could reduce accuracy of language marks for any mistakes you make past the 150 word target. Something that I found useful was creating myself a small checklist for things I knew I needed to include in my answer. For example, I wrote 'variety of tenses', 'opinions and justifications', 'adjectival agreement' etc and ticked them off as I did them. This can also come in handy when checking over your work at the end.