Hello everybody,
Today AQA have announced the form they will be asking students to write in in
this summer’s GCSE English Language Paper 2 question 5. And the form is: an article.
In this video I’ll remind you what you need to include when you’re writing in this form.
Now AQA previously released a document detailing the features of forms they would typically expect
students to use. In that document they listed things you should include as a minimum,
and more detailed or developed things you COULD include.
For an article, here’s what you SHOULD include:
A simple title Paragraphs
Now here’s what you COULD include:
A title A strapline
Subheadings An overview paragraph
One of the key things to understand about articles is the way the form works. Now sometimes on a
Saturday I’ll buy a newspaper, and there will be something like 150 pages of articles in it.
The same applies to any type of article: be it a newspaper, magazine or website:
articles will be placed amongst dozens, even hundreds of others.
Clearly there is no expectation to read every article - that would take more time than anyone
has available. So the key thing about articles is that they quickly get your attention and indicate
what the article is about, so you can make an informed decision on whether to read it or not.
Let’s look at an example from Mr Bruff’s Guide to GCSE English language.
This article is about how young people are not to blame for creating pollution. First up we have:
A) A headline which hint at the topic, often using alliteration. The idea here is you take a quick
look at the title and work out if it might be something you’re interested in reading more about.
B) a strapline should summarise the whole article in one or two sentences.
At the very least, we want to know who, what, when, and why.
Now this can seem a bit counterintuitive, almost a spoiler, giving everything away. But again the
point is understanding the form article - the writer needs to briefly summarise the
story so the reader, drawn in by the headline, can make a decision about whether to read on.
C) subheadings - A sub-heading
summarises the next section . You can see I’ve used a number of them here.
d) An overview paragraph: This paragraph references the quotation in the question
and firmly states your point of view.
So that’s what we expect to find in an article. At a minimum:
a title and writing in paragraphs. More in depth, everything in this list on the right.
Now for me, I’d probably aim to use all of these form conventions,
because I think it helps you to write a better article than if you don’t use them.
For example if you’re writing subheadings, you’ve got to think clearly about what each
paragraph is going to focus on, and that can only be a good thing.
AQA have also released details on the text types of the two unseen sources for section A,
and those are a 21st Century piece of autobiographical writing,
and a 19th century essay. What can we glean from this information? Well, for a start,
that the source in paper 1 will be from the 20th century. We know this because
the three sources across both exams cover 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, so now we
know the dates of the two in this paper, we can work out the dates of the source for paper 1.
Now in the upcoming weeks on this channel, let me know if you’d like me to focus
on writing articles, or on analysing examples of autobiographical writing,
and 19th century essays. It’s important to note, however, that the exam board have not
released so much advanced information to make it possible to pre-prepare and memorise an answer.
Yes you’ll be writing an article, but you don’t know what the topic of the question will be.
Likewise we know there will be an autobiographical piece and an essay, but we don’t know the detail
of those pieces. So this advanced info is useful, because it helps us direct
our revision - and that was always the point in the first place, to help make up for some of
the time lost over the past couple of years, but you still need to study just as hard to prepare.
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