QCE English extended written response for a public audience (IA1) quiz

A persuasive spoken response of 5 to 8 minutes, delivered to the class and assessed on speaking and listening skills

An extended written response of 1000 to 1500 words for a public audience, engaging the audience in a conversation about representations in literary texts

Creative writing produced under timed examination conditions in response to an unseen stimulus provided on the day

An analytical response to an unseen literary text written under timed examination conditions, with no notification period and no access to the texts or notes given to students beforehand at all

The audience is the marker only, so the response should be written as a formal academic essay aimed squarely at the teacher

The audience is the general school assembly, so the response should be pitched as a speech to be read aloud to all year levels

The response is calibrated for a school-identified wider audience (a feature-article reader, a literary journal subscriber, a long-form blog audience, etc.), not just an academic marker

There is no specified audience at all, so the writer is entirely free to ignore questions of register, diction, tone, and the reader's assumed background knowledge, and may write in whatever style they personally prefer

Quoting too much from the literary texts, so that the writer's own argument gets crowded out by long passages of quotation

Writing in a formal register throughout, which is exactly what a public-audience feature piece is supposed to sound like

Picking an unusual or lesser-known literary text rather than a famous one, which is assumed to automatically weaken the response no matter how skilfully and closely the chosen text is actually handled

Academic literary analysis dressed up for a general reader, or general reflections dressed up as literary analysis - the piece does not do both halves of the task

The novel's quietest passages, the kitchen scenes and the late-night walks, are where its argument about inherited class instinct lives, and the second text picks up that thread and complicates it.

The novel deals with the theme of class, and across the piece this idea will be explored using a range of examples drawn from the text.

The text uses many different literary techniques to engage with the theme of gender, and across the piece each of these techniques will be identified, named, and listed in turn, one after another, in the body sections below.

The text is broadly feminist in its outlook, and the response will set out to demonstrate that this single label fits the work throughout.

To repeat the introduction in different words across each section, reinforcing the same single observation again and again

To advance the conversation by one move per section: close engagement with a representation, connection across texts, cultural framing, comparative move, counter-frame

To list the literary techniques used in each text one after another, naming each device without building any sustained argument

To summarise the plots of both literary texts in turn, retelling the events of each one in order, so that the reader is brought fully up to speed on everything that happens from beginning to end

Purely academic, dense with theoretical jargon and specialist terms that only a literature student or scholar would readily follow

Conversational and personal throughout, built around the writer's own first-person opinions, anecdotes, and feelings about the topic rather than around any genuine close engagement with the literary texts themselves

Calibrated for the school-identified public audience: substantively analytical but legible to an interested non-specialist (read long-form literary criticism in newspapers and quarterlies for models)

Persuasive and emotive throughout, leaning on emotional appeals to move the reader rather than on close engagement with the texts

Only 1 or 2 quotes in the whole piece, leaving most claims about the texts unsupported by any direct textual evidence

30 or more quotes packed in across the piece, so that the response becomes a dense string of quotations from the texts with almost no room left for the writer's own argument or analysis

Just one long block quote per section, lifted at length from a single text rather than embedded briefly and woven into the prose

Multiple short embedded quotes (under 10 words each) distributed across the body sections, drawn from both literary texts (rough quote count balanced between the two)

1000 to 1500 words

500 to 700 words

800 to 1000 words

2000 to 2500 words

Apologise to the reader for using theory, signalling that the writer is uneasy about bringing any critical perspective into the piece at all

Use a critical perspective lightly if it genuinely illuminates the texts for the public audience; foreground the texts and the conversation rather than performing theoretical literacy

Remove all critical perspective from the essay entirely, so the piece becomes a plain summary with no analytical framing of the texts

List every critical perspective you considered along the way, naming each school of literary theory in turn and explaining it briefly, purely to show the marker the breadth of your theoretical reading

Externally by QCAA assessors only, with the school and your own teacher playing no part in the marking of the piece

By computer scoring software that analyses the response automatically, without any human marker reading the work at all

By your teacher against QCAA criteria, then confirmed through QCAA's endorsement process

By a panel of external markers from other schools who meet to mark every student's IA1 response together as a group