Creative re-casting (Section B): transforming a given source text into a new genre, audience, purpose or mode, making deliberate language choices appropriate to the new form.

What this dot point is asking

Unit 4 Section B is creative re-casting: you are given a source text and must transform it into a new genre, audience, purpose or mode. It is a directed-writing task that tests your control of genre conventions and your ability to repurpose material intelligently, drawing on everything you know about how texts are shaped for readers. The key skill is selecting and reshaping the source, not copying it.

The answer

Re-casting means transformation, not copying

Adopt the target genre's conventions

Each target genre has conventions you must adopt. A feature article needs an engaging opening, a developed body and a satisfying close, often with a human-interest angle and subheadings; a leaflet needs clear sections, headings and direct address; a speech needs rhetorical patterning and signposting for the ear; a radio script is written to be heard. Identify the conventions of the genre you are asked to produce and let them shape the piece.

Pitch register and content for the new audience

Mind the mode

Make deliberate, analysable choices

As in Unit 2 original writing, the strongest re-casts are built from deliberate language choices: a chosen register, controlled sentence variety, well-judged structure and genre-appropriate features. Craft with intention, so the piece reads as a genuine example of the target genre and shows command of how texts are made for readers.

How Section B is assessed

Section B rewards AO5 (writing in an appropriate genre for audience and purpose) and the control of register, form and language. The discriminator is the quality and intelligence of the transformation: a top re-cast confidently changes genre, audience and mode and uses the source as raw material, while a weak one transcribes or only lightly edits the original.

Examples in context

Model opening (re-casting research notes as a magazine feature). Every night, while the city sleeps, an army of foxes goes to work. We tend to picture wildlife somewhere far away, beyond the last streetlight, yet the most adaptable predator in Britain may be padding past your bins right now. This opening transforms a source of dry information into the conventions of a feature article for a general adult readership: it begins with an arresting hook rather than a fact, uses a human-relatable second-person address ("your bins") to draw the reader in, and reshapes the source's data into a narrative angle (urban wildlife on the doorstep). The register is accessible but literate, suited to a magazine reader, and the content has been selected and reframed, not copied, which is exactly what re-casting rewards: the source's facts survive, but the genre, audience and purpose are entirely new.

Try this

Q1. What is creative re-casting? [2 marks]

• Cue. Transforming a given source text into a new genre, audience, purpose or mode by selecting, reorganising and rewriting its content.

Q2. Why must you change register when you change audience? [2 marks]

• Cue. Register is the formality and kind of language suited to a reader; a new audience needs different vocabulary, references and pitch.

Q3. Using the source material, re-cast the information as a magazine feature for a general adult readership. [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. An intelligent transformation that selects and reshapes the source, adopts feature-article conventions, pitches the register for adults, and makes deliberate, genre-appropriate choices.