Five Plan Items, Thirty-Five Minutes
A candidate has 35 minutes and a 350–450 word limit for a discursive essay on the motion 'School students should be paid for good attendance.' Her plan has five items: (1) an anecdote about her cousin, who improved after being promised a phone; (2) three statistics she half-remembers from a news site; (3) a counter-argument about families who cannot afford to reward attendance; (4) a joke about the headteacher's reserved parking space; (5) a proposal that local businesses sponsor the payments. She intends to use all five across four paragraphs, because a teacher once told her that 'more points means more marks'. The mark scheme rewards a clear line of argument, well-chosen supporting evidence and consistent control of register.
1. Advise her which items to keep, cut, compress or move, and justify each decision against the mark scheme and the time limit.
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Keep (3), but move it. A counter-argument only earns credit if it is answered. Put it after her own case, so the essay concedes something real and then replies to it. That is the paragraph an examiner looks for.
Keep (5) and place it last. It gives the essay a destination and it can answer the objection in (3): if families cannot fund rewards, an outside sponsor removes the unfairness. A proposal that answers the counter-argument is worth more than a proposal bolted on.
Cut (2). Half-remembered figures cannot be checked in the exam, and a wrong statistic destroys her authority more thoroughly than no statistic at all. Replace them with reasoning she owns and can defend.
Compress (1) to a clause or cut it. One cousin is not evidence about a national policy; as a two-sentence story it also costs 40 words she does not have.
Cut (4). A joke about the headteacher signals that she is not taking the motion seriously, and register slips are penalised.
Budget: introduction 60, case for 100, counter-argument and reply 120, proposal and close 80 - about 360 words, inside the limit with room to spare.
2. Write the topic sentence of the paragraph that handles item (3). It must concede something real without abandoning her position.
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Model sentence: 'The strongest objection to paying for attendance is that it rewards students whose families can already get them to school and penalises those who cannot - but that is an argument about how the money is given, not about whether attendance is worth encouraging.'
Why it earns credit.
- It names the objection fairly rather than in a weakened form ('some people might say'), which is what distinguishes real engagement from a token nod.
- The concession comes first and the pivot is a single 'but', so the sentence stays readable.
- It narrows her claim instead of repeating it: she no longer has to defend payment in every form, only payment funded so that it does not depend on family income. That is exactly what item (5) then delivers.
- No first person, no rhetorical question - register stays consistent with a discursive essay.
3. Her friend says the essay should open with 'Attention all readers! Do you not agree that this outrageous situation must end?' Explain whether this is a good opening for this task.
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No - it borrows the wrong genre. The exclamation, the direct address and the rhetorical question belong to a speech or a campaigning leaflet, not to a discursive essay whose mark scheme rewards a clear line of argument. It also promises outrage without saying what the situation is, so the reader learns nothing in the first twenty words.
It wastes the most valuable sentence in the essay. The opening should establish the position and the shape of the argument. Something like: 'Paying students for attendance is either a sensible incentive or a bribe with a receipt; which it is depends entirely on how the money is raised and who controls it.' That signals a line of argument and gives the essay somewhere to go.
The judgement being tested: energy in an opening is not the same as force. A direct question can work in a persuasive speech precisely because the audience is present; on the page, with an examiner reading forty scripts, clarity wins.