Extended Response to Reading
The only question on Paper 1 that asks you to stop being a candidate and start being somebody — a passenger, a journalist, a witness. Half the marks are for who you sound like.
What Question 4 asks
Twenty marks. About 250–300 words, drawing on Text C. And a mark scheme that has been split down the middle.
| Half | Objectives | What is being asked | Marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading | R1 R2 R3 R5 | Did you use the text? Did you go beyond it? Did you select what your persona would actually care about? | 10 |
| Writing | W1 W2 W3 W4 | Do you sound like the person the question named, writing to the audience it named, in the form it named? | 10 |
Two things follow immediately. A response that reproduces Text C accurately but sounds like an exam answer scores about ten. A response with a dazzling voice and nothing drawn from the text scores about the same. The band above requires both, in the same sentences.
The three things the question always fixes
01 The form — one of six: letter, report, journal, speech, interview, article. Its conventions are marked under W4. 02 The persona — who you are. This governs what you plausibly know; you cannot describe what your character never saw. 03 The audience — who you are writing to. This governs formality, and it is the fastest way to lose or win W4.
The six text types
Six forms are examinable. Each has a tense, an audience and a purpose baked into it, and each will be marked against expectations you did not set.
| Form | Voice and tense | What earns W4 |
|---|---|---|
| Letter | First person, to one named reader. Usually past or present. | Salutation and sign-off matched to formality. A relationship implied from the first line. |
| Report | Impersonal, past and present. Written for someone who must act on it. | Headed sections. Findings before recommendations. No emotion — or emotion reported, not felt. |
| Journal | First person, private, retrospective. Nobody is being persuaded. | Unguarded thought. Self-contradiction is allowed here and nowhere else. |
| Speech | First person to a crowd, present tense, spoken aloud. | Direct address, rhetorical questions, patterns of three, a closing that lands. |
| Interview | Two voices, alternating. Present tense. | Questions that actually probe. The interviewee must sound different from the interviewer. |
| Article | Third or first person, for a general readership. | A headline. An opening that earns attention. A structure that could survive being cut short. |
The test that catches a wrong form
Read your first two sentences and ask: could this opening belong to any of the other five forms? If it could, it is not doing the work of the form you were assigned. A journal that opens like an article has already forfeited W4.
Developing, not repeating
The commonest ceiling in this question is invisible: the candidate writes well, uses the text faithfully, and still lands mid-band — because they added nothing.
Three ways to develop a detail
Take one detail from Text C — the mother watching her child, "awake since Tuesday". Reproduced, it is a fact. Developed, it becomes three different things: 01 infer backwards — why is she awake since Tuesday? A night shift, a sick relative, a journey she could not afford to break; the text does not say, and R3 is awarded for the reasoned guess. 02 project forwards — what happens when they dock? Someone is meeting them, or nobody is. 03 draw a conclusion — the ferry is not full of travellers, it is full of people for whom this crossing is work.
| Reproduces — caps around R1 | Develops — reaches R3 |
|---|---|
| There was a mother on board watching her daughter walk up and down the aisle. She looked very tired because she had been awake since Tuesday. Every fact accurate, every fact already in the text. | The woman across the aisle had been awake since Tuesday, she said, and she said it the way people say the time — as a fact, not a complaint. I found myself hoping somebody would be waiting for them at the other end, and suspecting nobody would be. The text’s detail, extended into inference, judgement and consequence. |
The one-question test: after each paragraph, ask could a reader who has Text C in front of them have written this paragraph without me? If yes, you have reproduced. If no — if you have supplied a cause, a consequence, a judgement or a feeling that the text withheld — you have developed, and R3 is now available to you.
Holding the voice
Ten writing marks depend on sounding like one person for three hundred words. Most losses happen in the last fifty.
Three decisions, made before you write
The voice is chosen in the thirty seconds before the first sentence, and then obeyed. What does this person want? A journal entry wants to understand; a speech wants to move; a report wants to be acted on. What do they already know? A fellow passenger need not be told there was a ferry; an outside reader must be. How would they never speak? Name one register the persona would never use — and then watch for it.
Worked example — one detail, three voices
The same moment from Text C — the engines changing note, and the passengers waking — rendered in three forms. The facts never change; only the person does.
Journal: "Four in the morning, and the engines shifted. Nobody said anything. We simply all began to gather our coats, like a field of birds going up at once, and I have been thinking since about how much of what we know we never learn from being told."
Speech: "Let me tell you what I saw at four in the morning. An engine changed its note — and a hundred strangers, who had not spoken all night, stood up together. Nobody announced it. Nobody had to. That is what a shared crossing does to people."
Report: "At approximately 04:00 a change in engine tone was observed. No announcement was made. Passengers began independently to collect belongings, indicating that the arrival signal is well understood by regular users and that formal notification may be unnecessary on this route."
Look at what the report cannot do. It cannot say I have been thinking since. The form forbids it — and that constraint is precisely what the examiner is checking you have noticed.
Exam advice
Common mistakes
Model answer
Recall checklist
- State the mark split of Question 4 and the objectives in each half.
- Identify the form, persona and audience before writing a word.
- Give the six examinable text types and one convention of each.
- Distinguish reproduction from development in one sentence.
- Apply the three ways to develop a detail — infer, project, conclude.
- Explain why W5 earns no marks here, and why accuracy still matters.
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