Writing
Writing assesses how well you fulfil a communicative task for a specified reader: a report, proposal, review, article, essay, or formal letter/email. Marks divide roughly between task achievement, organisation, range, and accuracy, and the first of these is where scripts most often fail - a fluent answer to the wrong question cannot score highly.
What the examiner checks
- Task achievement: every bullet in the prompt addressed and developed, not merely mentioned. Identify the reader and the purpose before planning.
- Register: reports and proposals are impersonal and formal (It is recommended that ...); reviews can be evaluative and lightly informal; essays argue.
- Organisation: one controlling idea per paragraph, a topic sentence, then support. Use headings in reports and proposals.
- Cohesion: link by reference and lexical chains, not only by connectors. A paragraph of Furthermore, Moreover, In addition is mechanical.
- Range with control: nominalisation, hedging, passive and impersonal constructions, complex noun phrases - used accurately.
Worked example
Prompt: a report for a college committee on library opening hours. Weak: The library closes too early and students are unhappy about it. Revised: Evidence from the student survey suggests that the current 8 p.m. closing time is a significant source of dissatisfaction, particularly among postgraduates.
Reasoning: the revision nominalises (dissatisfaction), cites evidence rather than asserting, hedges with suggests, specifies the group, and gives the committee something actionable. It also keeps the register impersonal - no contractions, no emotive unhappy - and sets up the recommendation that follows.
Traps
- Reproducing a memorised essay that only partly fits the prompt.
- Answering the first bullet at length and the second in one clause.
- Announcing a conclusion in the introduction and then repeating it.
- Register clash: contractions, etc., rhetorical questions, or slang in a formal report.
- Over-hedging until the claim disappears (It could possibly perhaps be argued that ...).
- Long sentences that lose subject–verb agreement or become fragments.
- Ignoring the word limit: under-length scripts cannot develop the task.
- Using an advanced word whose collocation you do not know; accuracy earns more than ostentation.