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Analysis and Investigation
Quick questions on Original writing and commentary - Edexcel A-Level English Language
7short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is its register (formal or intimate, technical or accessible)?Show answer
What lexical fields recur? What sentence variety gives it rhythm? How does it open and close (the discourse structure)?
What is writing the commentary?Show answer
The commentary is where most marks are won or lost, and the single decisive distinction is between narration and analysis. Narration recounts the writing process ("first I wrote an introduction, then I decided to add a question"). It is a diary of decisions and it scores little. Analysis treats the finished text as data: it quotes a feature, names it precisely, explains its effect on the defined audience, and links it to the style model.
What is a travel feature and its commentary?Show answer
A student writes a travel article on a coastal town, modelled on a broadsheet weekend feature. The opening uses a fronted adverbial and sensory lexis: "Before dawn, the harbour smells of diesel and salt." A strong commentary analyses this rather than describing it: the fronted adverbial "Before dawn" establishes a cinematic in-medias-res opening, the coordinated concrete nouns "diesel and salt" build a sensory lexical field that grounds the place in working reality rather than postcard cliche, and this deliberately echoes the style model's habit of opening on a specific sensory image to earn the reader's trust before any evaluation.
What is a speech and its commentary?Show answer
A student writes a school-assembly speech persuading peers to join a climate group, modelled on a published activist address. The piece uses an asyndetic tricolon: "We march, we organise, we win." A strong commentary analyses the asyndeton (omitting conjunctions) as accelerating the rhythm to suggest momentum and inevitability, the parallel present-tense verbs as constructing collective agency, and the placement at the close as leaving the audience on a rhetorical high point, all mirroring the cadenced endings of the style model.
What is q1?Show answer
What is the purpose of a style model in the original-writing task? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
Give one example of an analytical commentary sentence and explain why it scores better than narration. [3 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Explain how original writing and its commentary should be matched to a defined audience and purpose. [16 marks]
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