Text Production and Written Expression
Domain 2 - Text Production and Written Expression - assesses whether you can produce a purposeful text that satisfies a brief: an argumentative essay, a formal letter, a report, a review or a magazine article. At C2, sentence accuracy is assumed. Marks turn on task achievement, genre convention and the control of a sustained line of reasoning.
Meeting the brief
- Identify four parameters before writing: role (who is speaking), audience (who reads), purpose (what should change), genre (what shape the text takes). A letter of complaint to a rail operator needs facts, a specific remedy and a deadline; a report needs findings and recommendations; a review needs description plus judgement.
- The word limit is part of the task. In 250 words develop one claim with evidence and a counter-argument; do not list five undeveloped points.
- Cover every bullet in the prompt. An unaddressed content point caps the mark regardless of fluency.
Argument architecture
- State the thesis early in one committed sentence. Signpost with content, not with “Firstly/Secondly”.
- Each body paragraph: claim, evidence or illustration, commentary linking back to the thesis.
- Concede and rebut: “It is true that X; yet Y” raises the band because it shows you can hold two positions and adjudicate between them.
Language control
- Vary sentence length and opening. A short sentence after two long ones lands a point.
- Prefer concrete verbs to nominalisations unless the genre is administrative.
- Use cohesive ties - pronouns, lexical repetition, ellipsis - rather than a chain of moreover and furthermore.
Worked example
Weak: “Remote work is very bad for creativity because people do not meet. Moreover, it is bad for teamwork. Furthermore, offices are better.”
Rewrite: “Remote work weakens the unplanned encounters that generate ideas: the corridor question, the overheard argument. That does not make offices superior - focused remote days often produce more - but it does mean teams need engineered substitutes for serendipity.”
Reasoning: the rewrite names a mechanism instead of asserting a verdict, concedes a point, uses colon and dash for rhythm, and closes on a claim that follows. The original stacks assertions and outsources logic to connectors.
Traps
- A memorised essay transplanted onto an unrelated prompt.
- Register slippage: contractions, exclamation marks or rhetorical questions in a report.
- Connector inflation in place of actual reasoning.
- No conclusion, or a conclusion that only repeats the introduction.
- Mixing British and American spelling within one text.