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The second half of AQA Paper 2, Section B asks you to produce a piece of directed writing: an original text — most often an opinion article for a broadsheet or quality magazine — in which you argue a position about a language issue, on the same topic as the two texts you have just analysed. This task is worth 30 marks and is assessed almost entirely against AO5 (expertise and creativity in writing for a specified purpose and audience). The analysis question that precedes it carries the larger 40 marks and rewards AO1, AO2 and AO3; but here, in the directed-writing task, your craft as a writer moves to centre stage. This lesson is about that craft: how to plan, structure, open, argue, rebut, and close a persuasive piece, with worked exemplars throughout.
A vital framing point before anything else: although AO5 dominates the marks, the raw material of a good opinion piece is still linguistic knowledge. The examiners are not asking for content-free rhetoric. The strongest responses are persuasive because they marshal real evidence — named linguists, concepts and examples — and dramatise it with skill. Think of it as AO2 knowledge delivered through AO5 craft.
In the exam you will be given a prompt — typically a provocative statement or a question — connected to the topic of the source texts (Standard English, accent prejudice, global English, gender and language, texting, political correctness, and so on). You will also be given a genre, audience and sometimes a context ("Write an opinion article for a broadsheet newspaper", "Write the text for a talk to other students"). You must:
Key Definition: Directed writing — a task in which you compose an original text to a specified purpose, audience and form. In Section B it means writing your own persuasive piece on a language discourse, demonstrating the writing expertise assessed by AO5.
Two failure modes sit at opposite extremes, and you must avoid both. The first is all rhetoric, no substance: a fluent rant with no linguistic content, which cannot reach the top because it has nothing to say. The second is all content, no craft: a competent essay that reads like an analysis answer, listing theories without shaping them into persuasive, audience-aware prose. The target is the difficult middle — informed and crafted.
It also pays to be clear-eyed about why this task exists at all. AQA is testing a genuinely transferable skill: the ability to take a body of specialist knowledge and turn it into writing that a non-specialist will read, follow and be persuaded by. That is what professional writers, journalists, lawyers, campaigners and analysts do every day — they translate expertise into argument for a general audience. Seen that way, the directed-writing task is not an artificial hoop but a rehearsal of one of the most valuable things an education in English can give you. Approaching it in that spirit — as real writing for a real reader, rather than as an exam exercise to be endured — is itself a quiet advantage, because writing that the author cares about almost always reads better than writing produced purely to be marked.
You have only part of the paper's time for this task, so a few minutes of planning are decisive, not a luxury.
Read the prompt with care and choose a stance. The realistic options form a spectrum:
| Stance | Description | When it works |
|---|---|---|
| Strongly agree | Wholehearted support | Best when you have abundant evidence; guard against one-sidedness |
| Strongly disagree | Outright rejection | Best when you can systematically dismantle the claim |
| Agree, with reservations | Broad support, acknowledged complications | Often the most sophisticated stance |
| Disagree, with concessions | Broad rejection, some valid points granted | Equally nuanced and mature |
| "It depends" | The answer turns on definitions or context | Powerful if tightly structured; risky if it drifts into fence-sitting |
The single most common weakness is sitting on the fence. Take a position. Nuance is a virtue; indecision is not. A clear thesis that you then qualify intelligently outscores a survey that never commits.
A practical tip on choosing: pick the stance you can best evidence, not necessarily the one you privately hold. The exam does not reward sincerity; it rewards a well-supported, well-written case. If you can muster three strong, evidenced arguments against the prompt and only one for, argue against it — even if your real view is more mixed. You are demonstrating a skill, and the skill is the same whichever side you take.
Jot a quick inventory of the linguistic knowledge you can deploy:
A reliable shape for a persuasive piece:
The opening must hook, frame the issue, and signal your stance — fast. Four reliable techniques, each illustrated:
Provocative statement — a bold claim that demands a reaction:
The apostrophe is the most overrated mark in English, and the army of pedants dedicated to defending it is fighting a war that was lost long ago.
Anecdote / scenario — a vivid specific that humanises the abstraction:
Last week a friend was turned down after a phone interview. Her qualifications were excellent, her answers articulate. The problem, a sympathetic insider admitted, was her accent. She sounds, apparently, "too Birmingham".
Rhetorical question — drawing the reader straight into the dilemma:
If a child arrives at school speaking fluent, complex, vivid English that simply happens not to be the standard, do we really want to be the people who tell her she is speaking wrongly?
Challenging received wisdom — naming a lazy consensus and promising to break it:
It is an article of faith in certain columns that texting is destroying English. The claim has been repeated so often it now passes for common sense. It is also, as it happens, nonsense.
Notice that all four imply the writer's position without baldly stating "In this essay I will argue…". Showing your stance through tone is more sophisticated than announcing it.
This is where AO5 craft and AO2 substance fuse. Each body paragraph should move through a clear arc — claim → evidence → analysis → link — but written as persuasion, not as a lab report.
The single biggest discriminator is how you handle a source. Compare three levels:
Aim always for the third level. The evidence is identical; the marks come from deploying it inside an argument.
We are forever being told that young people "can't spell any more", and that their phones are to blame. It is a comforting story for the middle-aged, and almost entirely untrue. Crystal's research found that the overwhelming majority of words in text messages are spelled conventionally; the famous abbreviations are the exception, not the rule, and several studies have linked frequent texting to better, not worse, spelling. This should not surprise us. A child inventing "gr8" has to know that "great" sounds that way in the first place — text-speak is not ignorance of spelling but a game played on top of it. The real moral panic, as so often, tells us less about young people than about the anxieties of those who fear them.
Examiner-style commentary: A Top-band paragraph. AO5 is strong — the confiding tone ("a comforting story for the middle-aged"), the well-judged short sentence, and the closing aphorism all belong to the opinion-column register. AO2 is integrated: Crystal's finding and the "gr8 requires great" point do real persuasive work. A Mid-band version would assert "texting does not harm spelling and Crystal proved it" without the analysis of why, the register control, or the turn onto adult anxiety.
A persuasive piece that ignores the other side looks naïve; one that defeats the other side looks formidable. Master these four moves:
| Move | How it works | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Concede and counter | Grant a partial truth, then trump it | "Of course a shared standard aids communication — but that is no warrant for sneering at the millions who speak perfectly functional varieties of their own." |
| Expose the assumption | Name a hidden premise and deny it | "The argument rests on equating change with decline — an equation no linguist accepts." |
| Reframe the question | Show they are asking the wrong thing | "The issue is not whether Standard English is useful — obviously it is — but whether it should be the only English we permit." |
| Turn their evidence | Use their own example against them | "Split infinitives are offered as proof of decline; yet English speakers have split them happily since the Middle Ages, and no serious grammarian now blinks." |
The concede-and-counter structure is especially powerful because it makes you look fair-minded and in command. A reader trusts a writer who can state the opposing case better than the opposition can. A useful test: before you rebut an argument, ask whether you have stated it in a form its own supporters would recognise and accept. If you have only knocked down a caricature — a straw man — the win is hollow and a sharp reader will notice. Defeat the strongest version of the other side, and your victory is genuinely earned.
The target register is that of quality opinion journalism — formal enough to be authoritative, personal enough to be alive. It is neither an academic essay nor a chat. Its hallmarks:
Key Definition: Register — the variety of language appropriate to a particular context, audience and purpose. Directed writing for a broadsheet demands a formal-but-personal persuasive register: the controlled, opinionated voice of the serious columnist.
The classic appeals are worth holding in mind: ethos (your credibility, built by accurate knowledge and a reasonable tone), pathos (emotional engagement, via anecdote and vivid example), and logos (logical force, via evidence and reasoning). A top piece blends all three, leaning on logos for the argument and ethos for trust, with pathos in reserve for the opening and the close.
A word specifically about ethos, because it is where AO2 and AO5 meet most directly. Your credibility with the reader is built, above all, by getting things right. A single confidently asserted error — a misremembered date, an invented statistic, a linguist credited with the wrong idea — punctures the authority on which the whole piece depends; the reader who catches it begins to distrust everything else. This is the practical reason the fabrication rule matters so much in this genre: persuasion is a relationship of trust, and accuracy is its currency. It is far better to write "research consistently suggests" than to manufacture a precise figure you cannot stand behind. Hedge honestly, and your authority survives; bluff, and it collapses.
It also helps to think about the reader's journey through your piece. Good opinion writing does not merely stack arguments; it takes the reader somewhere. The opening unsettles a comfortable assumption; the body dismantles it, evidence by evidence; the counter-argument shows you have considered the reader's likely objection before they could raise it; and the conclusion arrives at a new, earned vantage point. When a reader finishes a strong piece they feel they have been moved — intellectually, sometimes emotionally — from where they started. Planning that journey, rather than just listing points, is what lifts structure from competent to compelling.
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