How do you write a critical commentary that analyses and justifies your own writing using linguistic and literary concepts?
Writing the critical commentary that accompanies re-creative and original writing: analysing your own choices with metalanguage, linking them to a base text or style model, and reflecting on effect.
How to write the critical commentary in AQA 7707: analysing and justifying your own re-creative or original writing with accurate metalanguage, linking choices to a base text or style model, and reflecting on intended effect rather than summarising the process.
Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed
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What this dot point is asking
A critical commentary accompanies your own crafted writing, whether the re-creative task in Exploring Conflict or an original piece. Its job is to analyse and justify your linguistic and structural choices using the same concepts and metalanguage you apply to published texts, and to link those choices to a base text or style model and to their intended effect. A commentary is analysis of your own writing, not a diary of how you wrote it, and it is assessed by the same integrated standard as everything else in the subject.
What a commentary is for
The commentary proves that the writing was the product of understanding, not accident. This is why it is assessed alongside the writing: the two together show both that you can craft a text and that you can analyse text-making, which is the integrated competence the qualification certifies. A piece of creative writing that happens to be effective scores less than one whose effects the writer can name, explain and trace to deliberate decisions, because the commentary is where the analytical learning is demonstrated.
Analysing your own choices
The discipline is to look at your finished piece as if a stranger had written it, then analyse it with the full toolkit: levels of language (lexis, grammar, phonology, graphology), discourse and pragmatics, and narratology where relevant. Be selective rather than exhaustive: choose the most significant and defensible choices and analyse them in depth, instead of cataloguing every feature. The acid test of a commentary sentence is whether it names a feature and explains its effect; if it merely reports what you did, it is not yet analysis.
Linking to the model and effect
Connect each choice back to the base text or style model (what you borrowed, adapted or resisted) and forward to its intended effect on the reader. This dual link, to source and to effect, is what raises a commentary from descriptive to analytical. The backward link demonstrates that your writing is an informed response to a model rather than free invention; the forward link demonstrates that you understand how language produces effect. A choice analysed without either link floats free: it tells the reader you made a decision but not why it belongs to this task or what it achieves.
How to write a strong commentary
Keep notes on your conscious decisions as you draft, because a commentary written from genuine decisions is far stronger than one reverse-engineered from a finished piece. Structure the commentary around significant choices, naming each feature and explaining its effect and its link to the model. Redraft for precision and concision, and check each paragraph makes the dual link backward to the model and forward to effect.
Try this
Q1. State the purpose of a critical commentary. [2 marks]
- Cue. To analyse and justify your own writing choices with linguistic concepts and link them to a model and to their effect.
Q2. Explain the difference between analysing choices and narrating the process. [3 marks]
- Cue. Analysing choices names features and their effects; narrating the process just describes the order in which you wrote, which earns no marks.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of AQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AQA 201916 marksWrite a critical commentary analysing the linguistic and structural choices in a piece of your own re-creative or original writing and their intended effects.Show worked answer →
The commentary applies the integrated method to your own writing. Markers reward analysis and justification of choices, not a narrative of the writing process.
Select your most significant choices (perspective, genre, register, lexical field, grammar, structure) and name each with accurate metalanguage. For every choice, explain its intended effect on the reader and its link to the base text or style model.
Treat your own text as data, exactly as you would a published text. A commentary that says first I did this, then I changed that earns little; the marks are in the integrated analysis of deliberate choices and their effects.
AQA 202116 marksExplain how you would link the choices in your own writing to a base text or style model in a critical commentary.Show worked answer →
The focus is the dual link that defines a strong commentary: backward to the model and forward to effect. Markers reward concrete method.
Describe identifying what you borrowed, adapted or resisted from the base text or style model, and naming the features that carry that relationship. Then describe linking each choice forward to its intended effect on the reader.
Show that this is integrated analysis with accurate metalanguage, not description. A commentary that names the model but never analyses the relationship, or that lists features without effects, caps its marks.
Related dot points
- The Writing about society task in Exploring Conflict: producing a re-creative piece based on a set text and a critical commentary that analyses the choices and their relationship to the original.
How to tackle the AQA Exploring Conflict re-creative task: producing a transformed piece based on a set text and a critical commentary that analyses your linguistic and structural choices and how they relate to the original.
- The Making Connections NEA investigation: choosing texts and a focus, comparing one literary and one non-literary text or a theme across texts, and meeting the academic and referencing requirements.
How to plan and write the AQA 7707 Making Connections non-exam assessment: selecting a literary and a non-literary text, framing a comparative focus, structuring the analysis and meeting the word count and referencing requirements.
- The skill of comparison for the NEA and exams: building a comparative framework, comparing across genres, and using points of similarity and difference to drive an integrated argument.
How to compare texts and genres for AQA 7707: building a comparative framework, handling literary and non-literary genres together, and using similarity and difference to drive an integrated, evidenced argument across the NEA and the exams.
- The integrated method at the heart of 7707: combining literary interpretation with precise linguistic analysis so that language evidence drives interpretation rather than sitting beside it.
An explanation of the integrated language and literature method that defines AQA 7707: how to combine literary interpretation with precise linguistic analysis so that named features evidence meaning, and how this differs from language-only or literature-only study.
- The levels of language analysis as the metalinguistic toolkit for 7707: phonology and prosodics, lexis and semantics, grammar and morphology, and graphology, applied to literary and non-literary texts.
An overview of the levels of language analysis for AQA 7707: phonology and prosodics, lexis and semantics, grammar and morphology, and graphology, and how to apply this metalinguistic toolkit to literary and non-literary texts with accurate terminology.