Language and power: instrumental and influential power, Fairclough's synthetic personalisation and unequal encounters, power in discourse and behind discourse, and persuasive techniques.

What this topic is asking

AQA wants you to analyse how power is exercised and contested through language: the difference between instrumental and influential power, Fairclough's ideas of unequal encounters and synthetic personalisation, and the persuasive techniques used in powerful discourse. The examiner reward is for connecting a linguistic feature to the kind of power it enacts and to its effect on the reader or hearer.

Instrumental and influential power

The two are realised through different linguistic choices, and identifying which is at work is your first analytical move. Instrumental power surfaces as imperatives, modal verbs of obligation ("you must", "students shall"), formal register, and control of the interaction (who speaks, who is questioned). Influential power surfaces as rhetoric: flattery, emotive lexis, inclusive pronouns and persuasive structures, because the speaker cannot simply order compliance and must instead make the audience want to agree. A political speech blends both: a leader has some instrumental authority but relies mainly on influential techniques to win consent.

Fairclough: power in and behind discourse

This distinction is powerful in the exam because it lets you read both the surface and the structure. Power in discourse is what you can quote (an interruption, a closed question that controls the answer). Power behind discourse is the institutional fact that, say, an interviewer is allowed to control the encounter at all. Fairclough also introduced the unequal encounter, an interaction where one participant has more power by role, which frames doctor-patient, courtroom and interview data. Synthetic personalisation is his best-known concept for influential power: a corporate email or advert addresses millions as "you", manufacturing intimacy to make persuasion feel like a personal favour.

The persuasive toolkit and resistance

Analyse persuasive and powerful texts for pronouns (inclusive "we" to build an in-group, direct "you" for synthetic personalisation), imperatives, modality, presupposition (assuming something is already agreed, which slips it past scrutiny), rhetorical devices (tripling, antithesis, rhetorical questions) and face management (politeness that softens an imposition). Crucially, power is not one-way: note where less powerful participants resist, by challenging a topic, refusing a presupposition, or seizing a turn, because the dynamic of contestation is part of the analysis the higher bands reward.

Try this

• Take a text and decide whether its power is mainly instrumental or influential, citing one feature as proof.
• Find a presupposition in an advert or speech and explain what it sneaks past the reader.
• Identify one moment of resistance in an unequal encounter and say how the less powerful speaker pushes back.