AQA ENGLISH LANGUAGE

How to get good marks for AO6 for English Language writing tasks (P1Q5 and P2Q5)

Introducing AO6 and sentence demarcation

This is the 1st guide in a 3-part series focussing on AO6 — the 16 mark assessment objective for the English Language writing tasks. The mark scheme is identical for both papers, so the guides apply to fiction and non-fiction writing.

This guide is part of the English Language AO6 series:

  1. Part 1 - Introducing AO6 and sentence demarcation

  2. Part 2 - Getting the punctuation marks

  3. Part 3 - Using varied sentences and ambitious vocabulary

What this series is about — the two AOs for writing

The three guides in this series apply to both English Language writing questions (P1Q5 and P2Q5) since they both use the same mark scheme. There are two assessment objectives for these questions:

  1. AO5: “Communicate clearly, effectively and imaginatively, selecting and adapting tone, style and register for different forms, purposes and audiences. Organise information and ideas, using structural and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion of texts.” (24 marks)

  2. AO6: “Candidates must use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.” (16 marks)

AO5 is essentially the macro-level assessment — how good is the content of the whole text? — and AO6 is the micro-level assessment — how good are the sentences you use to create that content?

  1. AO5: whole text. How good are your characters/ideas, plot/argument, narrative voice/style, structure, cohesion and paragraphing? This is the focus of our various creative writing skills guides for these questions and we have lots of information about this.

  2. AO6: sentences. How accurate are your sentences? How well written are they, including vocabulary choice? How varied are they in length and structure?

These 3 guides are focussed entirely on AO6 — getting good marks for your sentences.

The six bullet points for AO6 in the AQA mark scheme

Focus of the bullet point

Example descriptor
Level 2 — Grade 5

Example descriptor
Level 4 — Grade 8-9

1. Sentence demarcation

Sentence demarcation is mostly secure and sometimes accurate

Sentence demarcation is consistently secure and consistently accurate

2. Punctuation

Some control of a range of punctuation

Wide range of punctuation is used with a high level of accuracy

3. Sentence forms

Attempts a variety of sentence forms

Uses a full range of appropriate sentence forms for effect

4. Grammatical accuracy

Some use of Standard English with some control of agreement

Uses Standard English consistently and appropriately with secure control of complex grammatical structures

5. Spelling*

Some accurate spelling of more complex words

High level of accuracy in spelling, including ambitious vocabulary

6. Vocabulary

Varied use of vocabulary 

Extensive and ambitious use of vocabulary

* The spelling bullet point won’t be covered in this series as it would broaden the scope too much — we’ve already had to split it over 3 different guides! We have a page on the website about common misspellings — you can look at this to avoid the real clunkers. You can also just write some stuff on a computer and see what words it flags up as spelled wrongly. Then just learn those spellings.

What does it all mean? 5 key questions for doing well at AO6.

These six bullet points in the assessment critera create the following key questions that you need to fully understand to get the highest marks for AO6.

1. What is a sentence and how do you know when one starts and ends in order to “consistently” do sentence demarcation accurately?

2. How do you accurately do the punctuation that students often get wrong?

3. How do you use a “wide range” of punctuation?

4. How do you create “varied sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures” and with “control of agreement”?

5. What is “ambitious” vocabulary and how do you use it “extensive[ly]”?

In this first guide in the series we’ll go through question 1, which is the most complex one to explain.

In the second guide we’ll look at the second and third questions, which focus on punctuation.

In the third guide we’ll look at final two questions, which are about sentence construction and vocabulary.

Q1: What is a sentence and how do you know when one starts and ends in order to “consistently” do sentence demarcation accurately? (AO6 — Bullet Point 1 — “sentence demarcation”)

This bit is quite technical, but it’s important for understanding not just how to demarcate sentences, but also for some of the punctuation rules in the second guide (bullet point 2 in the AO6 mark scheme), and for understanding what it means to create “varied sentence forms” (bullet point 3 in the AO6 mark scheme) which we discuss in the third guide.

We will lay the groundwork for all that here. It’s complicated, but we’ll keep things as simple as we can.

There are 4 concepts you need to understand.

Concept 1: Sentences are made up of clauses

The first thing you need to understand is that sentences are made up of clauses. Every sentence contains at least one clause. We’ll talk a bit more about what clauses are in the next bit of the guide, but you need to understand that they’re a thing. A sentence is a collection of one or more clauses.

Sentences come in types — you would have learnt about this in primary school, as well as at KS3 — and the type of sentence is determined by the number of clauses and by the way those clauses are combined. We discuss this in more detail in our guide to sentences, but here’s a quick reminder:

  1. Simple sentences are just one clause.

  2. Compound sentences are two or more clauses joined by coordinating conjunctions (or by semi-colons or dashes — more on this in the next guide).

  3. Complex sentences are two or more clauses joined by subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns (we’ll refer to these collectively as “conjunctions” in this guide, for the sake of simplicity).

  4. Compound-complex sentences are a mix of compound and complex sentences, which include 3 or more clauses joined by both coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

If any of that is completely alien to you, look at our guide to sentences. (There are also, technically, minor sentences, which don’t contain a clause; we discuss these in the glossary but they’re not something that we need to worry about here.)

As long as you’re clear that a sentence is a collection of one or more clauses, you’re ready for the next concept.

Concept 2: A clause has one main verb

The next thing you need to understand is that each clause contains one (and only one) main verb. The main verb in a clause is the verb that conveys its tense. So, if you change the tense of the clause, the main verb is the one you change. Sometimes clauses have other verbs in them too, but these are not main verbs. They are generally participles, which don’t convey tense (they’re what’s called non-finite verbs). Let’s look at a quick example to make this a bit clearer:

  • Harriet walked through the freight yard towards the woods, hopping over the tracks and humming to herself.

This sentence is made up of one clause (it’s a simple sentence), but it has three verbs in it: one main verb (walked) and two present participles (hopping, humming). You can tell that “walked” is the main verb because it’s the one you would need to change if you wanted to change the tense. At the moment the sentence is in the past tense; the present tense version sentence would be this:

  • Harriet walks through the freight yard towards the woods, hopping over the tracks and humming to herself.

Notice that “walked” is the only verb that changes — the two present participles stay exactly the same. That is because “walked” is the only main verb in this sentence. And that is because this sentence only contains one clause (e.g. it’s a simple sentence).

Let’s look at a few more quick examples. Read them and see if you can spot the main verb (the one that conveys the tense) in each sentence. We’ll explain afterwards. These are all simple sentences, so they contain just one clause, and therefore one main verb. But what is it?

  1. Shopping is fun.

  2. Running as fast as possible, she went to the station.

  3. Her voice was very loud in the silence.

  4. She had not eaten a burger like this before.

Some of these are slightly tricky. Let’s go through them quickly:

  1. Shopping is fun. Here the main verb is …. is. The past tense version would be Shopping was fun. In this case the main verb is the verb ‘be’, which is one of the trickiest ones to spot (see the box below).

  2. Running as fast as possible, she went to the station. Here the main verb is … went. This is the past tense of the verb ‘go’ — another tricky one to spot (see the box below). The present tense version would be Running as fast as possible, she goes to the station. Notice that the whole sentence is the same, except for the main verb.

  3. Her voice was very loud in the silence. Here the main verb is … was. This is ‘be’ again. the present tense version would be Her voice is very loud in the silence.

  4. She had not eaten a burger like this before. Here the main verb is … had eaten. This one is tricky because it’s in the past perfect tense, so there’s an auxiliary and a past participle (it’s a verb phrase, technically speaking) and because it’s negated it’s got a “not” in the middle of the verb phrase. There’s not nearly enough room to explain all of this here (this is already pretty complex), but we wanted to have one example that showed that this can get complicated. Nevertheless, you should be able to see the tensed verb is ‘had’ — that’s the one you’d change if you switched to present (She has not eaten a burger like this before). That’s the test you need to do to spot the main verb, if you’re struggling: change the tense of the sentence in your head and look at what verb changes.

Now, if you’re thinking this is really hard, don’t panic. Sometimes it is (like with example 4, which is why we included it here), but most of the time it isn’t that hard. And you don’t have to be an expert at this: you just have to know what a main verb is. Why? Well, when it comes to identifying clauses, which is essential for correct sentence demarcation, being able to recognise the main verb(s) is the key step. We’ll look at this in more detail in Concept 3, coming up soon.

Verbs to be careful of when trying to identify the main verb

The two verbs that often throw people are ‘be’ and ‘go’ because they’re both very common in English and also very irregular, so people don’t always realise they’re verbs. ‘Be’ has lots of irregular forms (is, are, were, etc) and ‘go’ becomes a seemingly different verb in the past tense (went). Try not to get caught out by this if you’re trying to find the main verb.

Concept 3: Identifying the clauses means identifying main verbs

So far we’ve said:

  1. Sentences are made up of clauses

  2. Every clause has one main verb in it (and no more)

From this, we can deduce the following:

  • The number of main verbs in a sentence is equal to the number of clauses in a sentence

So, if there is one main verb then there must be one clause; if there are two mains verbs then there must be two clauses; and so on.

Now, this is a slight over-simplification, which we’ll discuss in the box below, but for most sentences, this is the rule. The number of main verbs equals the number of clauses.

Let’s look at some examples sentences with the main verbs marked in bold.

  • When she stepped onto the footpath and into the shady woods, the passage from warmth to cool was like swimming into a cool plume of spring water in the lake.
    This sentence has two main verbs and therefore two clauses. (It’s a complex sentence, though that doesn’t really matter for our purposes — we just need to be able to spot the clauses.)

  • Airy clouds of buzzing gnats swirled away from her, spinning from the sudden movement, like pond creatures in green water.
    This sentence has just one main verb and therefore only one clause. It’s a long clause, and there is a participle verb, but only one main verb (only one that conveys tense).

  • Barbs of fox-tail and witch grass prickled up in tufts, and the ruts in the clay were coated in slimy green algae.
    This sentence is shorter than the last one, but it has two main verbs and therefore two clauses. (It’s a compound sentence, though again, this doesn’t really matter for our purposes — we just need to be able to spot the clauses.)

Being able to do this yourself — being able to identify the clauses in the sentences that you write — is essential if you want to demarcate your sentences correctly and avoid comma splicing. It takes a long time to explain (as you’ve probably noticed by now), but it’s actually very simple.

To identify the clauses you’ve written, you need to find the main verbs — each main verb is a different clause.

That’s it. Why does this matter? We’ll see in Concept 4. But, first, a quick sidebar.

When clauses don’t just have one main verb — a tricky complication

In the description above we’ve slightly over-simplified things. This box explains some of the complications. If this part of the guide is already feeling too complicated for you, you might want to skip this bit and come back to it another day (no shame).

1. Compound predicates

Consider the following sentence, with the main verbs in bold.

  • Sally walked into the bathroom and looked at the toilet.

This has two main verbs, which should mean it’s two clauses, right? Unfortunately, not. It’s actually only one clause, technically. This is what’s called a compound predicate (you don’t need to know the terminology) which is when there’s one subject but more than one main verb (if you’re not sure what subjects are, check the glossary). These kinds of sentences are fairly common, but they’re easy to recognise. Find the main verbs as usual, and then check to see if they each have a subject. If not (e.g. if the subject is shared between the verbs) then you can essentially treat it as one clause. Here’s the first example with the SUBJECT highlighted.

  • SALLY walked into the bathroom and looked at the toilet.

Below are a few more examples. In each one the subject has been HIGHLIGHTED, as well as the main verbs.

  • SOMETHING was not okay, had not been okay since Monday.

  • HE shuffles out of Clappison's courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air.

  • On the way back MY BROTHER WILLIAM turned, told me to hurry and made a joke about me being slower than the dead.

In all of these instances, there is technically just one clause, even though there are two or more main verbs. That’s because there is only one subject for all the verbs. As we said earlier, this is what’s called a compound predicate. You don’t need to remember the term, but it is useful to be aware that this is a thing that writers can do — and that you may do yourself in your writing without realising it. It’s good to know about this when you’re looking for main verbs as a way to identify clauses.

2. Recursive sentences, especially those with conjunctions omitted

There’s one other common complication to the whole “one main verb per clause” rule. Consider the following sentences, with the main verbs in bold (the last one is a deliberately extreme to emphasise the point):

  1. I thought I would go for a walk

  2. They had said she was too old for this

  3. I think she thinks I think she is clever.

These sentences seem to break the rules we’ve outlined above. If each main verb means a new clause then we would have some very strange clauses here: I thought, They had said, etc. They certainly don’t work as sentences on their own. That’s because these sentences use a process called recursion, whereby clauses can be embedded in other clauses. The final example is an extreme example to demonstrate how recursion can go on and on and on and on... Technically speaking, recursion should be done using a form of conjunction (the relative pronoun that) which would make these three sentences read as follows:

  1. I thought that I would go for a walk.

  2. They had said that she was too old for this.

  3. I think that she thinks that I think that she is clever.

This makes things a bit clearer, since there is a conjunction of a sort between the clauses, but it still leaves us with those weird clauses (I think that, I thought that, etc). If you find that you’ve written in this way (as we just did at the start of this sentence), you just need to treat the whole thing as a single clause.

Summing up

In both of these cases, especially for the recursive sentences, you can probably see for yourself what’s going on. You can see that “I suppose I can’t go on holiday” has two main verbs in it but doesn’t need a full stop after the word ‘suppose’.

We’re only bringing it up here so you don’t get thrown by it when you try to follow this process for yourself.

If you do encounter a situation when the process doesn’t work, for some reason, don’t worry. You’ll be forgiven if you get the sentence demarcation wrong in edge-cases like these. It’s the basic cases that you need to ensure you get right.

Concept 4: Sentences end at the end of the last clause

We’re nearly done — phew! Up to now we’ve seen the following:

  1. Sentences are made up of one or more clauses

  2. You can see if a bit of a sentence is a clause because it’s got a main verb in it (and only one main verb in it, most of the time)

  3. Through this you can identify the clauses in your own writing

So, where does a sentence end? How do you know if you need a full-stop?

The answer is simple, as long as you understand the 3 things above: a sentence ends at the end of the last clause which is not followed by a conjunction, a colon, a semi-colon or dash. This is where you need to put a full-stop to demarcate your sentence — at the end of the clause if it’s not followed by a conjunction.

Let’s look at this in a short example.

In the first version, the sentence demarcation is wrong. That’s because there are some sentences which are demarcated with (e.g. separated by) commas, and not with of full-stops (how to end a sentence), and also not with conjunctions, colons, semi-colons or dashes (how to join a clause to another clause).

This is called comma-splicing and it’s what this whole thing has been about. This is what you must NOT do for both bullet point 1 and bullet point 2 in the AO6 mark scheme.

We’ll go through it afterwards, but read the example and see if you can spot the errors for yourself.

Example of bad sentence demarcation

Slowly she walked, gazing up at the dark canopy, and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell, she looked down, a glittering green snake, not poisonous, lay dead on the path ahead of her, it was about three feet long, and its stomach had been stomped flat.

Hopefully, you can see all the errors here for yourself. In which case, great! But if you can’t, how can you avoid these kinds of mistakes in your own writing? How can you proofread your work and check that you haven’t done this?

Answer: by finding the main verbs, and therefore the clauses.

Let’s do this now:

Example of bad sentence demarcation with the main verbs highlighted

Slowly she walked, gazing up at the dark canopy, and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell, she looked down, a glittering green snake, not poisonous, lay dead on the path ahead of her, it was about three feet long, and its stomach had been stomped flat.

Because we know that each main verb represents a clause, we can check whether or not the clauses (represented by these main verbs) have been joined together correctly. Are they joined with conjunctions (or colons, semi-colons or dashes) — good? Or are they joined with commas — bad?

Example of bad sentence demarcation with the clauses isolated

  1. Slowly she walked, gazing up at the dark canopy, and

  2. she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which

  3. grew louder and louder until

  4. she smelled a bad smell,

  5. she looked down,

  6. a glittering green snake, not poisonous, lay dead on the path ahead of her,

  7. it was about three feet long, and

  8. its stomach had been stomped flat.

Now things should be clearer. We’ve separated the clauses onto different lines (notice there is one main verb, in bold, per line) and we’ve underlined all the conjunctions. Now it makes it nice and easy to see which ones are joined together correctly and which are not.

  1. Ends with a conjunction (and)

  2. Ends with a conjunction (which)

  3. Ends with a conjunction (until)

  4. Ends with a comma

  5. Ends with a comma

  6. Ends with a comma

  7. Ends with a conjunction (and)

  8. Ends with a full-stop.

So, this shows us clearly where the errors are: they’re at the end of the 4th, 5th and 6th clauses. All of these clauses have no conjunction at the end, nor do they have a colon/semi-colon/dash, so they should be the end of the sentence. That’s the rule. The sentence ends at the end of the last clause without a conjunction or a colon/semi-colon/dash at the end. This means those commas need to be turned into full-stops. Otherwise we have 3 sentences demarcated with commas, which is wrong (this is comma-splicing). The fixed version would look like this:

Example of good sentence demaraction

Slowly she walked, gazing up at the dark canopy, and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell. She looked down. A glittering green snake, not poisonous, lay dead on the path ahead of her. It was about three feet long, and its stomach had been stomped flat.

We’ll do one more quick example just to help you check your understanding. We’ll do the same 3 steps as before:

  1. Identify the main verbs

  2. Isolate the clauses

  3. Check how they’re joined

Obviously, in an exam you would do all of this in your head, but we’ll write it out in full here.

Example of bad sentence demarcation

I'm nearly thirty years old now and I've been working here since I was twenty-one, Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened, I suppose he felt sorry for me, I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm, maybe he sensed, back then, that I would never aspire to anything more than a poorly paid office job.

First, we’ll identify the main verbs.

Example of bad sentence demarcation with main verbs highlighted

I'm nearly thirty years old now and I've been working here since I was twenty-one, Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened, I suppose he felt sorry for me, I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm, maybe he sensed, back then, that I would never aspire to anything more than a poorly paid office job.

Now, we’ll isolate the clauses to make the demarcation clear:

Example of bad sentence demarcation with the clauses isolated

  1. I'm nearly thirty years old now and

  2. I've been working here since

  3. I was twenty-one,

  4. Bob, the owner, took me on not long after

  5. the office opened,

  6. I suppose he felt sorry for me, [an example of recursion]

  7. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and

  8. I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm,

  9. maybe he sensed, back then, that

  10. I would never aspire to anything more than a poorly paid office job.

Third, we need to check how these clauses are joined. 1, 2, 4, 7 and 9 all have a conjunction at the end, so they’re all fine. However, 3, 5, 6 and 8 all end with a comma. This is bad. They’re the ones that need to be fixed by turning those commas into full-stops. That would give us this.

Example of good sentence demarcation

I'm nearly thirty years old now and I've been working here since I was twenty-one. Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm. Maybe he sensed, back then, that I would never aspire to anything more than a poorly paid office job.

And we’re done!

Now, this almost certainly seems very complicated right now, but don’t panic. The point is not that you need to go through these lengthy processes yourself during an exam. That would be madness! The point is that you understand the principle which we’ve been systematically and laboriously outlining here, namely that clauses must not be joined with commas.

That’s it, really.

However, in order to check that you’re not doing this, you have to know what a clause is, and you have to recognise when you’ve started a new one. Hence the lengthy process we’ve been going through.

If I want to get my sentence demarcation right, I don’t have to go through this process, most of the time. That’s because I’m good at recognising clauses. I write with them in mind, and if I notice I’ve comma-spliced I’ll quickly correct it.

But that’s only because I know the stuff we’ve been explaining in this guide.

And you don’t need to be as good as me at this — you’re not trying to be an English teacher; you just need to be pretty good. You just need to know what it means to comma-splice (to join main clauses with commas); you need to know what to look for to check for it; and you need to do as good a job as you can.

As long as you can do that, you’ll get yourself into at least Level 3 in the mark scheme for this bullet point, and maybe even into Level 4.

What’s coming up in the next two guides in the series

In the next guide, we’ll look at the second and third questions, which are both about punctuation:

2. How do you accurately do the punctuation that students often get wrong?

3. How do you do a “wide range” of punctuation?

In the final guide, we’ll look at the last two questions, which are a bit more about style:

4. How do you create varied “sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures” and with “control of agreement”?

5. What is “ambitious” vocabulary and how do you use it “extensive[ly]”?

We’ll also look at one final example extract that you can use to check your understanding of covered in the three guides in the series.

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