Take it apart.
X-ray the same message across spoken, written and electronic mode, rewrite a directive along the power and politeness axes, and drag a word's meaning through six centuries.
Language-levels x-ray
FIG. 01 · AO1 · MODE & METHOD
No levels selected — switch one back on to see the annotations.
One message — the shop shuts early because the heating has failed — produced three ways.
Toggle a level off and its annotations vanish. Filter down to one and you are doing exactly what Paper 1 Section A asks: one level at a time, integrated afterwards.
Why this is worth marks. AO1 is applied across every component and it is not awarded for spotting features — it is awarded for integrating the levels with accurate terminology. Paper 1 Section A hands you unseen texts differing in audience, purpose, genre and mode; the students who score are the ones who can say why an agentless nominalisation appears on a shop door but never in the staff group chat. Filter to a single level, then say what it is doing.
Power & politeness dial
FIG. 02 · AO2 · SOCIOLECTS
Same speech act every time: get the report finished tonight. Only the power relationship moves.
Brown & Levinson's four strategies, from doing nothing to protect face up to hinting so heavily you never ask at all.
Why this is worth marks. Paper 2 Section A rewards AO2 — critical understanding of concepts and issues, not a list of theorists. Notice what the dial exposes: the subordinate can only reach the same act by climbing the politeness scale, because asymmetry is built into the discourse before anyone opens their mouth. That observation — power constrains which strategies are even available — is the evaluative move top-band essays make about instrumental power, face and mitigation.
Semantic drift
FIG. 03 · AO2 · LANGUAGE CHANGE
Drag forward. The spelling barely moves; the meaning walks off entirely — which is the whole prescriptivist argument, and its refutation.
Why this is worth marks. Paper 2 asks you to explain change with the right process word — broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, metaphorical extension — and then to evaluate attitudes to it (AO2). Drag the slider on "nice" and the descriptivist case writes itself: every meaning a prescriptivist defends is itself the wreckage of an earlier meaning someone else defended. Use that in the diversity-and-change essay rather than listing examples.