Letter #2 · June 2026
How a marker actually reads your child's essay
Hi,
We're in the long wait now. The 2026 Selective sitting is done, and results don't land until late August, so there's a stretch of time with not much to refresh. It's a good window to do something I found genuinely useful while preparing my own son: understand how the writing is actually marked, not to drill, just so you can read your child's writing with the same eyes a marker does.
I'm a data analyst by trade. When I was helping my son, I spent a lot of time reverse-engineering the NSW Selective writing rubric from the official sample answers and examiner comments. Here's the version I wish someone had handed me.
It's 25 marks, in two halves
The writing is scored out of 25, across 6 dimensions, in two sets.
Set A: what was written (15 marks).
- Content & Detail: is it specific and developed, or vague and thin?
- Structure & Cohesion: does it hold together, with real paragraphs, a sensible sequence, and an ending that lands?
- Style, Vocabulary & Register: word choice, a recognisable voice, and the right tone for the task.
Set B: how cleanly it's written (10 marks).
- Sentence Variety & Control: a mix of sentence lengths and types, handled on purpose rather than by accident.
- Punctuation: correct, and occasionally used for effect.
- Spelling: common words right, and ambitious words attempted accurately.
The one thing most parents get wrong
A marker doesn't tick boxes one dimension at a time. From what tutors and former markers describe, they read the whole piece once at reading speed, form a gut sense of the band, then check that feeling against the dimensions and adjust.
What that means for you: a single flashy sentence won't lift a thin piece, and one spelling slip won't sink a strong one. It's the overall impression first, then the details.
How to use this at home, without drilling
Don't try to fix all six at once. That's how kids burn out. Find the ONE dimension that's consistently weakest and work only on that for a while.
For us, one of the clearest was spelling. His ideas were there, but ambitious words kept tripping him, so for a few weeks that's all we watched, and the score moved. Then we picked the next weakest. One at a time is slower on paper and much faster in practice.
Seeing which dimension is weakest is honestly the whole reason I built EurekaWrite: you paste an essay, and it scores across all six with a marker's logic and quotes the exact lines that cost marks. I test every version against 42 human-marked essays before I trust it, so the feedback is as close to a real marker as I can make it. It's free, no signup: try it here.
If you want to go deeper
The full breakdown of each dimension and what each band looks like is here: the NSW Selective writing marking criteria. And if you're wondering how accurate AI scoring really is, I publish the numbers rather than ask you to take it on faith: how accurate EurekaWrite is.
One thing
Reply and tell me which of the six your child finds hardest. I'm collecting these, and it genuinely shapes what I write and build next. Just drop a line to eurekawrite@haorix.com. I read every email.
Talk soon,
Hao
Sydney
Next letter: the 5 most common ways NSW essays lose marks, drawn from the patterns I see across real student writing.