Original writing (part b): producing a piece of writing for a specified genre, audience, purpose and mode, using deliberate language choices.

What this dot point is asking

Unit 2 part (b) is the original writing task. You produce a piece in a specified genre for a defined audience and purpose, in a stated mode. Crucially, this is writing as a linguist: the marks come from controlled, purposeful language choices that match the brief, and the same piece is then analysed by you in the part (c) commentary. So you write with one eye on the choices you will later explain.

The answer

Match genre, audience, purpose and mode

A travel piece for a weekend magazine and a persuasive article for a college magazine demand very different registers, structures and voices; identifying the brief's frames before you write prevents generic, one-size writing.

Make deliberate linguistic choices

Treat each effect as a tool: vivid sensory lexis and figurative language for descriptive writing; rhetorical questions, direct address and tripling for persuasion; clear, ordered syntax and second-person instructions for a how-to text.

Shape form and structure

Form and structure carry as much weight as sentence-level craft. A persuasive article needs a hooking opening, developed arguments and a memorable close; travel writing often opens in the middle of an experience, then orients the reader; a review balances summary, evaluation and recommendation. Use paragraphing, headings (where the genre allows) and discourse markers to lead the reader through the piece.

Register and consistency

Write for the commentary

Because part (c) is a self-analysis of this very piece, the strongest approach is to plant analysable craft as you write: a controlling metaphor you can discuss, a deliberate tense shift, a structural decision you can justify. This does not mean overwriting; it means writing with intention, so the commentary has real choices to explain rather than after-the-fact rationalisations.

Examples in context

Model opening (travel writing for a weekend magazine). The bus coughs to a halt at the edge of the salt flats, and for a moment nobody moves. Then the doors hiss open and the heat arrives, thick and white, pressing against your face like a hand. Out there the ground is not ground at all but a vast cracked mirror, the horizon dissolving where the salt meets the sky, so that the few figures already walking on it seem to be wading through cloud. I had come for the famous photographs, the ones where perspective collapses and a traveller appears to balance a friend in the palm of one hand. What I had not expected was the silence: a silence so complete that my own pulse became the loudest thing for miles. This opening is engineered for an adult magazine reader: a present-tense hook drops the reader into the scene, sensory lexis ("thick", "white", "pressing") builds atmosphere, a simile gives the heat agency, and the final short sentence after a long one lands the surprise of the silence. Each of these is a choice a commentary could justify as serving the genre's appeal to an educated, leisure-reading audience.

Try this

Q1. Name the four frames a part (b) brief always specifies. [2 marks]

• Cue. Genre, audience, purpose and mode.

Q2. Why should you write part (b) with the part (c) commentary in mind? [2 marks]

• Cue. Because you will analyse this very piece, so deliberate, conscious choices give the commentary real craft to explain.

Q3. Write the opening of a piece of travel writing for a weekend magazine to engage an adult readership. [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. A controlled opening in the conventions of travel writing, pitched for the audience, with deliberate, analysable choices of lexis, sentence variety and structure.