Choosing a Format for a Community Health Campaign
Students must create a persuasive text for a real audience as part of their Creating Texts assessment. The brief: persuade 16-25 year olds in a regional town of 8,000 people to attend a free mental-health drop-in service that opens on Saturdays. The service has 2 staff, a budget of $400 for promotion, and no social media accounts yet. Students may choose any format. Tomas chooses a 900-word formal essay titled "The Importance of Mental Health Services", with an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion, and submits it as a poster design with the essay text shrunk into 9-point font. His justification is: "Essays are the most academic format, so they will get the best mark." The teacher must respond in a way that develops Tomas's understanding of how format, audience and purpose interact.
1. Evaluate Tomas's format choice against the brief. Identify at least two specific mismatches between his text and its intended audience and purpose.
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Tomas has prioritised a school genre over the actual communication situation, producing at least two clear mismatches. First, audience: 16-25 year olds in a small town are unlikely to read a 900-word formal essay, and shrinking it into 9-point font on a poster makes it harder, not easier, to access; a poster is read in seconds from a distance, so dense small text defeats the format. Second, purpose: the brief is to persuade attendance at a specific service, which needs a clear call to action, location, time and a reason to trust the service. A generic essay on "the importance of mental health services" never names the drop-in service, its Saturday opening or how to attend, so it cannot achieve the persuasive purpose. Third, context: with a $400 budget and no social accounts, a low-cost, shareable and highly visible format would suit the constraints better. His essay may be well written but is aimed at a teacher, not the audience.
2. Tomas insists an essay is "the most academic format". Explain what the Creating Texts criteria actually reward and how a different format could score more highly.
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Creating Texts rewards control of the chosen form for a stated audience and purpose, not the prestige of the genre. An essay can score well when the task calls for sustained argument to an informed reader. Here the task calls for persuasion of a specific youth audience towards a specific action, so the criteria favour choices that fit that situation: a clear structure, appropriate register, deliberate language features and a coherent design. A short social-media video script, a series of three Instagram-style posts or a bold A3 poster with a QR code could all demonstrate stronger control because they show the student selecting language and layout for the real reader. For example, a poster using a direct second-person headline, one statistic, the Saturday times and a map would show purposeful choices at every level. Tomas's essay demonstrates writing skill but not situational judgement, which is what the task assesses.
3. Design a concrete revision pathway that lets Tomas keep some of his essay material while meeting the brief. Explain how each stage builds a different skill.
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A staged pathway preserves his strongest content while rebuilding the format. Stage one: Tomas extracts the two most persuasive ideas from his essay and rewrites each as a single sentence of no more than 15 words aimed at a 20-year-old reader; this builds audience awareness and concision. Stage two: he drafts a poster layout with a headline, one supporting line, the practical details (Saturday, location, free) and a call to action, then tests it by asking three classmates what they would do after five seconds of looking; this builds understanding of how design guides reading. Stage three: he writes a 150-word justification explaining each choice, linking headline, image and call to action to audience and purpose; this builds the analytical vocabulary the criteria reward. Each stage targets a different skill, and the final justification ensures the creative work is underpinned by explicit reasoning rather than decoration.