HookThe day the internet held a funeral for 'literally'
In August 2013, word spread that Google's dictionary result for 'literally' now included a second sense — the one that means 'not literally at all' — and the internet held a funeral. 'We killed English,' ran the viral posts, and columnists on both sides of the Atlantic filed obituaries for the language. Then the linguists arrived with the parish records: writers have been using non-literal 'literally' since at least 1769, Dickens did it in Nicholas Nickleby, and a dictionary recording a sense is a thermometer reading a temperature, not a doctor spreading a disease.
Everything in that story — the outrage, the history, the calm corrective, the metaphor that makes it stick — is the raw material of Paper 2's directed writing task. After the 40-mark analysis of two language-debate texts in Section B, the paper hands you 30 marks for an opinion piece about the same kind of language issue, written for readers who have never heard of a morpheme. Twenty of those marks are AO5, for the craft of the writing itself; ten are AO2, for the linguistic understanding underneath it. It is the only place on either exam paper where you are assessed as a writer — and the closest thing in the A-level to a real, publishable genre.
ModelThe genre already exists — popular linguistics journalism
Question 4 is not asking you to invent a form. Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet (2019), a book about the linguistics of emoji, keysmash and internet punctuation, became a New York Times bestseller. David Shariatmadari — a Guardian journalist, not an academic — wrote Don't Believe a Word (2019) debunking language myths for commuters. David Crystal has run the trade for half a century. There is a real market for exactly what this task demands: linguistic substance wearing readable clothes.
The brief is 'directed' because it fixes three things for you — form (almost always an opinion article or comparable piece), audience (non-specialist: intelligent, curious, no training), and purpose (argue a view on the language issue in front of you). Obeying all three is not the admin around the task; it is the task. The examiner reads for a genuine stance on the issue, carried in journalistic register, powered by knowledge of language study that the reader never trips over. Summarising the Section B texts is not a stance. Reciting your gender-theory revision is not journalism. The job is the marriage.
MechanismThe gloss — earning the ten AO2 marks without breaking register
The single most important move in this genre is the gloss: name the concept, unpack it in plain English in the same breath, then cash it against something the reader recognises. AO2's ten marks demand visible critical understanding — real debates (prescriptivism against descriptivism, the 'complaint tradition' of declinism), real research, real ideas like Jean Aitchison's decay metaphors from her 1996 Reith Lectures: the 'crumbling castle' view of English as a decaying monument, the 'damp spoon' distaste for lazy usage, the 'infectious disease' fear that bad habits spread. Those metaphors were built for a radio audience — which is why they transplant so well into a column.
The same discipline governs how you repurpose source material. The Section B texts and your two years of language study are a quarry: take positions and findings out of them, re-attribute them in your own voice ('as one campaigner likes to claim…'), and convert any statistic into a reader-sized comparison. Never transplant chunks of the source texts — the register seams always show.
Two versions of the same knowledge. Textbook register: 'Giles' Communication Accommodation Theory posits that speakers converge towards or diverge from their interlocutors as an identity strategy.' Column register: 'Linguists call it accommodation: your voice leans towards people you like, which is why you come home from a Newcastle weekend with an accent you didn't pack. We are all, it turns out, part-time mimics.' The second version keeps the concept (AO2), gains an audience (AO5), and costs exactly one gloss and one image.
MechanismRegister, tone, voice — where the twenty AO5 marks live
Set the dials deliberately. Person: a 'we' recruits the reader into your side of the argument; a 'you' charges them with something. Contractions and light elision buy informality, while precise lexis keeps your authority — the register of good comment journalism is relaxed grammar over exact vocabulary, not the reverse. Rhythm: build one long, cumulative sentence, then snap it with a three-word verdict. Open with an anecdote, not an abstraction. Use humour as seasoning, never as the meal.
Then furnish the genre: a patterned headline (contrast, echo, a controlled pun), a one-line standfirst if you want one, paragraphs of one to three sentences, an ending that lands somewhere on purpose. Two registers kill answers every summer. The first is the essay ghost — 'This article will discuss the ways in which…' — no column in history has begun that way. The second is the try-hard chat that mistakes exclamation marks and 'amirite?' for voice. Your target reader is the educated-curious: the person who reads the comment pages on the bus and forwards the good ones.
ModelArchitecture — five moves that survive the word count
Plan the argument as five moves before you write a word. One: a lead — small, concrete, preferably dated — that stages the issue ('In August 2013, Google's dictionary…'). Two: your thesis in one plain sentence. Three: the strongest opposing case, granted honestly — concession buys trust you will spend later. Four: your counter, with the linguistics doing the actual lifting. Five: an ending that returns to the lead with its meaning changed — the circular close is the genre's signature dismount.
Cohesion between the moves comes from lexical chains and anaphoric reference, not from bolted-on connectives; 'However' at the start of four consecutive paragraphs is scaffolding left up after the build. Timing: the paper is 100 marks in 2 hours 30, so this question's fair share is about 45 minutes — eight planning, thirty-two writing, five re-reading, because AO5 includes technical accuracy and the slips you never re-read for are the cheapest marks you will ever lose.
CaseOne paragraph, rebuilt — the same knowledge in two registers
The issue is accent bias. The knowledge: in 1970, Howard Giles asked Britons to rate accents for prestige and got a stable league table; in 2019, the Accent Bias Britain project at Queen Mary University of London re-ran the exercise across 38 accent labels and found the table had barely moved — RP still at the top, urban vernaculars still at the bottom. Now watch that identical knowledge wear two registers.
Essay register — accurate, and dead on arrival for this task: 'Research indicates that accent evaluation hierarchies remain stable over time. The 2019 Accent Bias Britain study found that received pronunciation continued to attract the highest status ratings while urban vernaculars received the lowest, suggesting entrenched language ideologies.'
Column register — what the task wants: 'Fifty years ago, researchers asked Britons to rank accents and got a league table: BBC English at the top, Birmingham flirting with relegation. In 2019, a team at Queen Mary University of London ran the exercise again, this time with thirty-eight accents. Half a century of social change, and the table has barely moved. We have redecorated our prejudices; we have not moved them out.'
What changed: the dates became narrative beats, the finding became a football metaphor, the agent became 'we', and the verdict moved to the very end of the final sentence, where end-focus makes it echo. What did not change: the study, the number, the conclusion — the AO2. Rebuild your knowledge like this, issue by issue, and the directed writing becomes 30 marks of prepared spontaneity.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
The directed writing carries 30 marks: 20 for AO5 — form, register, organisation and technical accuracy — and 10 for AO2, the language study underneath the argument. At 100 marks in 2 hours 30, its fair share is about 45 minutes; spend eight of them planning.
Read the brief like a contract — form, audience, purpose — then re-read your finished piece against those three words before you move on. Write the headline first; it forces an angle. Deploy two or three pieces of named, dated linguistic knowledge — a researcher, a project, a metaphor like Aitchison's crumbling castle — each one glossed for the lay reader and each one doing argumentative work. One concept per paragraph, cashed against an example the reader recognises, beats five names in a row every time.
Top-band AO5 rewards writing that inhabits the form rather than gesturing at it: paragraph like a columnist, vary sentence length on purpose, concede once, and end by design rather than by running out. And guard the last five minutes for proofreading — AO5 explicitly credits accuracy, and the comma splice in your final paragraph is the cheapest mark you will ever lose.