English · Report Writing
Report on the Annual Sports Day of Your School
A model event report on a sports day, in newspaper form.
Report the day in sequence: the opening, the main events and who won them, the prize distribution and the closing remarks. Keep yourself out of it — an event report is written in the third person, so "we enjoyed the day" belongs in a letter and not here.
The question: Write a report on the annual sports day of your school.
The format
Lead with participation, not weather
How many students, how many events, where and when. A sports report that opens on a bright sunny morning has spent its first sentence on nothing.
- Give both numbers in the first sentence.
- Name the ground.
Report results with names and margins
Three or four events with winners named, and the overall championship with points. A sports report without a single result is a description of a field.
- Name the houses or sections.
- Give the final points margin.
- 🚨 Invent names; never use real classmates.
Close on the prizes and what is next
Who distributed the prizes, who was thanked, and anything announced for next year. The announcement is the paragraph an editor would cut first, so it goes last.
Model answer
Model answer (about 195 words)
Annual sports day held at Barishal school
Our Correspondent
Barishal, 5 September: The annual sports competition of Barishal Zilla School was held on the school playground on Thursday, with more than four hundred students taking part across twenty-two events.
The day began at nine in the morning with a march past by the four houses, followed by the athletics events. The hundred metres for the senior boys was won by Tahsin Ahmed of Shaheed Titumir House, who also took the long jump. Among the junior boys, the four hundred metres went to Rafiul Islam of Sher-e-Bangla House. The tug of war between the staff and the senior students, held after lunch, was won by the students for the second consecutive year.
Sher-e-Bangla House took the overall championship with fifty-four points, ahead of Shaheed Titumir House on forty-seven.
The Headmaster distributed prizes at the closing ceremony and thanked the physical education staff and the guardians who had attended. He said the school intended to add swimming to next year's programme if arrangements could be made at the district pool.
What earns and loses marks
- Report results with names and numbers. Fifty-four points to forty-seven turns a description into a report, and it takes one sentence.
- Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
- 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
- Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
- About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three or four, with winners named, plus the overall result. Listing all twenty-two turns the report into a results sheet, and mentioning none turns it into a description of a playground. Selecting a few and reporting them properly is the skill being tested.
Yes — plausible invented names are expected, and they make the report specific. Never use the names of real classmates or teachers in an exam script, for the same reason you do not write your own name.
The prize distribution, who gave the prizes, and anything announced for the future. Background comes last in the inverted pyramid, and an announcement about next year’s programme is exactly the kind of detail an editor would cut first — which is why it belongs at the bottom.
Keep going
Model answers, formats and grammar rules for every SSC and HSC writing question.