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NEA Commentary

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As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will provide some guidance on completing the commentary for the NEA and useful tips. What is the commentary?  The commentary is designed to enable you to explain the decisions you have made in writing your piece and the language levels that you have employed and replicated following your exploration of a style model.  Word Count The commentary is just as important as the Original Writing piece in that it is also 750 words and the same number of marks (25).  Assessment Objectives  This piece will test your ability to employ all of the assessment objectives equally. Below is a screenshot from the criteria on the top band features:  What does this mean?  A01:   You need to use a range of language levels. Note the key words ‘integrated’ and ‘connected.’ Regardless of the language levels used, aim to cover a range rather than ...
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They're right

Still on the subject of gender, one area which has long been debated and contested is that of gendered pronouns and what we do when we don't want to signal gender. For example, an expression like "Each student should bring his own lunch" begins with an indefinite determiner ( each ) uses a male (singular) pronoun (or determiner, more accurately here) but assumes that all students will be male. Using his/her is an alternative, but is often seen as a clunky and still puts the male first. "Each student should bring their own lunch" runs into problems with subject and pronoun agreement (singular each and plural their ) but has often been seen as an acceptable way to phrase something like this. However, many formal publications and style guides have ruled against 'singular they' and seen it as a grammatical faux-pas. But even that seems to be changing, and the Associated Press this week announced that they would accept 'singular they' . The case for...
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Analysing meanings and representations 2

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In the textual analysis post yesterday I focused on how to analyse language to look at meanings and representations. In this post, I'll take a look at the ways in which you can explore how different opinions and views are put forward in texts and how you can start to do good AO1 and AO3 work on different kinds of texts. Again, this focuses primarily on Questions 1 and 2, where you are encouraged to look closely at how language creates meanings and representations. On one level, as I said in yesterday's post, this means getting a sense of how the overall subject of each text is being represented. If the topic of the text is the natural environment, how is this topic being represented? Here is an example taken from a Wildlife Trust leaflet: Here, you might make the point that the environment is being represented as under threat. How is this achieved? Through a series of different language choices, all contributing their own meanings to an overall representation. For example: the ...
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