Schreiben / Text Production: Analysis and Comment (Teil B)
Text production (Schreiben) is Teil B: roughly three and a half hours with a monolingual dictionary, a choice of tasks on a material basis. Typical LK formats are the analysis of a non-fictional text or political speech, the comment (argumentative essay), and combinations such as analyse and then comment; re-creative tasks appear too. Content and language are graded separately, and language is not a tiebreaker - it can pull a strong content answer down.
Analysis: structure and moves
- Introduction (3-4 sentences): author, title, text type, source or date where given, topic, thesis and intention. No plot summary.
- Body: organise by rhetorical strategy or the arc of the argument, not line by line. Each paragraph: claim or device, a short quotation, its function, its effect on this audience.
- Conclusion: the speaker's purpose, plus the evaluation if the task asks for it.
Language of analysis
Present tense; authorial verbs (argues, claims, concedes, invokes, frames); hedging for inference (implies, suggests); never quote without saying what the quotation does.
The comment
Thesis in the first paragraph that answers the exact prompt; two or three developed arguments (claim, evidence, explanation); one counterargument you actually rebut; a conclusion that decides. Use the material, and your own knowledge only where the task permits.
Worked example
Quotation (original): We are told the costs are too high. But what is the cost of doing nothing? Model: By turning the critics' objection into a rhetorical question, the speaker shifts the debate from expense to consequence and invites the audience to see inaction as the riskier choice. Reasoning: the sentence does three things the marker rewards - names the device, states its function (reframing) and specifies the effect on the audience. The speaker uses a rhetorical question to convince the reader names the device and stops, which is where most marks are lost.
Traps that cost marks
- Nacherzählung: retelling content, which earns nothing in an analysis.
- Device lists without function or effect.
- Generic effect phrases that would fit any text.
- Ignoring the second element (comment, evaluation), often half the task.
- Unclear paragraphing and missing connectives.
- Register slips: contractions and slang in an analytical text, Germanisms (actual for aktuell, become for bekommen).