AQA ENGLISH LANGUAGE
How to get good marks for AO6 for English Language writing tasks (P1Q5 and P2Q5)
PART 3
This is the 3rd 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.
Contents of this guide
This guide is part of the English Language AO6 series:
Part 3 - Using varied sentences and vocabulary
Reminders from part 1 — 5 key questions
In the 1st guide in this series, we discussed how the assessment criteria for AO6 creates the following key questions that you need to be comfortable with to do well in AO6. We went through the first, rather complex one in that guide. We then went through the two punctuation questions in the second guide in the series. In this final guide we’ll cover the last two questions.
1. What is a sentence and how do you know when one starts and ends in order to “consistently” do 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]”?
Q4: How do you create varied “sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures” with “control of agreement”? (Bullet Points 3 and 4)
SECTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Control of agreement = don’t mix your tenses + use plural and singular forms correctly (e.g. A pack of wolves was/*were circling the camp)
Varied sentence forms = mixing clauses/phrases in varied ways
· Fronted subordinate clauses
· Embedded relative clauses
· Embedded participle phrases
The best way to understand this is through examples:
Horrified, her heart pounding, Harriet began to run.
Drops of water, shaken loose from the vines, pittered all around her.
From a quarter of a mile away, I could hear the noise of the wood in the wind — a soft marine roar.
We saw the sea, deceptively calm and blue and serene with icebergs, stretching away eastward under an ashy sky.
When he was a small child, six years old or about that, his father’s apprentice had been making nails from the scrap pile.
For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out — perhaps especially when it doesn't work out — promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life.
When she saw the first video of monkeys dressed in human clothes, it just seemed random and, frankly, pretty ridiculous to Maisie.
She didn't understand what the appeal was — why anyone would take the time and effort to make these weird, tiny videos, let alone why they ended up in her feed — but they made her smile, and that, after all, was the point of TikTok.
It came as quite a shock, then, when a week or so after she saw the first monkey video, Maisie found herself watching her first monkey murder: a masked gibbon, clad in leather gloves, its proud pink behind thrust towards the camera, strangling a little moustachioed tamarin.
One way to get good at this is to read some professionally written work and steal some sentence structures from it. This is pretty easy to do, and you can have a few “interesting sentence structures” in you arsenal, ready to use in the exam, whatever question you’re asked to write.
Another way is just to practise. This is more noble. Just spend some time writing sentences with interesting structures. You can get a computer program to correct the punctuation and grammar, if need be. But just have some fun with sentences. That’s what this GCSE is meant to be all about.
Q5: What is “ambitious” vocabulary and how do you use it “extensive[ly]”? (Bullet Point 6)
SECTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Not about getting back to primary school “wow-words” — we don’t want an “azure” sky and a “plethora” of something or other.
There is no such thing as good words and bad words in any language — there are just words that carry the specific meaning you intend.
Specificity is the key — using one word (if one word is available) instead of multiple words.
But, being pragmatic, it’s worthwhile to learn a few “fancy” words — words that are used rarely, and which have a very specific meaning and which you can use correctly in your own work. And using them correctly is essential. We have a section of the website focussed on vocabulary learning, so we’re not going to replicate all of that here, but learning a few “fancy” words isn’t enough.
This is where the “extensive” part comes in. Let’s say you learn three ambitious words (verisimilitude, crepuscular and galvanise) and you get all three correctly into your piece of writing. This certainly won’t hurt your AO6, but it doesn’t guarantee you getting the marks about “extensive” use of ambitious vocabulary if the the vocabulary in the rest of your piece is basic. This part of the mark scheme is hard to cheat. Having some ambitious words at your disposal is definitely worthwhile, but it’s no guarantee.
To really excel at this — and this is why we’ve left it to last in these guides — you really do need to read books. That’s the only way to truly develop your vocabulary. We have a section of the website for that too, thought mostly the website can’t help with this. Just read some books.
One last extract to check your understanding
To finish the third guide in this series, we’ve included a short extract which does pretty much everything we’ve talk about across all three guides. To test your understanding, have a read through it, paying special attention to each sentence in the extract:
How does the sentence meet some of the criteria for AO6 that we’ve discussed in the three guide in this series?
Can you identify the main verb(s) and thus the clauses in the sentence?
Why is that punctuation used in the sentence?
What vocabulary do you think counts as ambitious?
Extract from ‘The Explorers’ by Katherine Rundell
At first Fred went fast, his head down, marking the trees with an X scratched in the bark, watching his feet among the roots and fallen branches. But soon he began to slow. There was so much to look at, so much that was strange, so much that was new and vast and so very palpably alive.
The trees dripped down their branches, laden with leaves broad enough to sew into trousers. He passed a tree with a vast termite nest, as big as a bathtub, growing around it. He gave it a wide birth.
The greenness, which had seemed such a forbidding wall of colour, was not, up close, green at all, Fred thought. It was a thousand different colours — lime and emerald and moss and jade and a deep dark almost black green that made him think of sunken ships.
Fred breathed in the smell. He'd been wrong to think it was thick, he thought; it was detailed. It was a tapestry of air.