270 words, 35 minutes: cutting an article without losing the task
Tomek has 35 minutes left on the rozszerzona paper and 270 words written for task 2: an article of 200–250 words for the school magazine describing a local initiative that has improved your area and encouraging readers to get involved. His draft has four paragraphs: an opening on the city's bike-share scheme with the figure 'over 60,000 journeys a month'; a second paragraph of numbers on traffic and air quality, including one statistic he half-remembers; a third describing the docking station at the end of his street, which he has never used; and a closing line, 'So what are you waiting for? You must sign up immediately!' The article uses contractions, one idiom ('a breath of fresh air') and a short anecdote about his cousin. His teacher's comment on the last essay was 'good language, but read the task again'.
1. Decide what Tomek should change in 35 minutes and in what order, justifying the priority.
Read the worked answer
Cut for length first, and cut paragraph 2.
Reasons, in order of cost:
- Time. Thirty-five minutes for 270 words plus cuts plus checking is tight. A plan that rewrites sentence by sentence runs out of time and leaves the last paragraph unchecked, which is where errors cluster.
- Length. The task allows 200–250 words. At 270 he is over, and every sentence he keeps is a sentence he must also proofread. Two paragraphs of statistics are the most compressible material in the text: least personal, least article-like, easiest to reduce to one sentence.
- Task fulfilment. The prompt has two elements - describe the initiative and encourage readers to get involved. The encouragement is currently a single exclamatory sentence. Cutting the numbers buys the words to make the closing paragraph do that job properly, which is worth more than any figure in paragraph 2.
So: keep the opening (trimmed), replace paragraph 2 with two sentences and one concrete local detail, keep paragraph 3, expand paragraph 4 by two or three sentences, and polish language last - only on material he has kept.
2. Should the 'over 60,000 journeys a month' figure stay, be softened, or go? Justify by what an examiner can and cannot check, and by what the article is for.
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Decide by function, not by truth. Nobody marking the paper can check '60,000 journeys a month', so the figure will not be penalised as false - but that is not a reason to keep it.
Two things do count. First, word cost: each number consumes words that the underdeveloped 'encourage' element needs. Second, rhetorical fit: an article for a school magazine works through concrete local detail and direct address, and unsourced figures in a student article read as padding. A half-remembered statistic is worse than a plain observation ('the docking stations are full by eight in the morning'), because vagueness plus apparent precision is the combination that sounds unreliable.
Best revision: keep at most one figure, attribute it loosely if possible ('the council's own figures'), and spend the saved words on the docking station at the end of his street - detail his readers can verify and only he can supply. Keeping both numbers means accepting a thin closing paragraph.
3. 'You must sign up immediately!' - decide whether Tomek should keep it, and rule on his contractions and the idiom.
Read the worked answer
Keep the contractions; change the closing line.
Contractions are a register feature of articles, not an error. A candidate who 'corrects' don't to do not throughout an article for a school magazine is applying letter conventions to the wrong genre, usually making the text stiffer without gaining anything. The idiom is also fine here - it would be out of place in a formal letter of complaint, not in a magazine piece.
'You must sign up immediately!' is the weak point, and not because imperatives are banned: direct address is exactly what an article does. The problem is the modal. 'Must' imposes an obligation on the reader, and 'immediately' pushes the hyperbole further; together they sound like an instruction from an authority rather than an invitation from a peer. The prompt asks Tomek to encourage. 'Why not sign up this week?' or 'The station at the end of my street is quiet after seven - come and try it' encourages by lowering the barrier, and it does so in fewer words, which he needs.