English Language Paper 2 Question 5

1 hour 45 mins - the paper recommends you spend 15 minutes reading the source material and all the questions, so there are about 45 minutes for each section.

80 marks in total - 40 marks for Section A and 40 marks for Section B.

Example Question: "'Teenagers are obsessed with social networking sites which have a completely negative impact on their lives. Social networking sites should be banned.' Write an article in which you agree or disagree with this statement."

That question is a polemic statement, which has a very strong opinion.

This is good because as it's such a strong opinion, everybody will have a reaction to it so you are never going to be sat there thinking you have no idea, however, it's also bad because lots of people are going to have the same reaction.

1/3rd of the marks are awarded for spelling, punctuation, and grammar, so you must remember to have semicolons, short paragraphs, etc because those get you a lot of the marks. This means the technical accuracy of your writing is important in this question.

The persuasive/arrested devices are:

Alliteration

Rhetorical Questions

Repetition

Emotive Language

Statistics

(Rule of) Three

Exaggeration

Direct address

Second guess and try to anticipate your reader's response and argue against that.