Composition, Writing and Rhetoric
What this domain tests
This domain assesses control of extended writing: essay architecture, paragraph development, cohesion and coherence, register and audience, argument quality, and the rhetorical resources that make prose persuasive. Expect tasks that ask you to improve, diagnose or justify a piece of writing.
Core rules and concepts
- Essay architecture: an introduction that frames and states a thesis, body paragraphs built as topic sentence → evidence → commentary → link, and a conclusion that answers 'so what' instead of summarising.
- Modes of writing: narrative, descriptive, expository and argumentative/persuasive. Academic argument prefers hedged, evidence-based claims to assertion.
- Cohesion uses pronouns, transition signals, parallel structure and lexical repetition; coherence is the logical order and relevance of ideas. Cohesive ties cannot rescue an incoherent argument.
- Register and audience: formality, contraction use, nominalisation, impersonal passive, field-specific lexis, and sentence-length variation for rhythm.
- Rhetorical appeals: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), logos (reason). Figures include metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, antithesis, anaphora, hyperbole and irony.
- Toulmin argument structure: claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal. Avoid hasty generalisation, false dilemma and circular reasoning.
- Process writing: plan, draft, revise for structure, edit for style, proofread for mechanics.
Worked example
Weak topic sentence: 'Technology has changed education.' Diagnosis: vague, uncontestable, and it announces a topic rather than making a claim. Revision: 'Although learning platforms widen access, they also reward schools with reliable connectivity, so digital schooling can widen the attainment gap.'
Reasoning: the revision is specific, contestable, contains a concession that shapes the paragraph's evidence, and predicts the sequence of the paragraph. That is what a topic sentence must do.
Traps
- A thesis that merely announces the subject.
- Evidence without commentary - quotation is not analysis.
- Shifting person or tense mid-essay without purpose.
- Overusing rhetorical questions in academic prose.
- Introducing a new argument in the conclusion.