AQA ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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

Using varied sentences and ambitious vocabulary

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

Key reminders from part 1 — 5 key questions
Question 4: How do you create varied “sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures”? And how do you do this accurately with “control of agreement”?
Question 5: What is “ambitious” vocabulary and how do you use it “extensive[ly]”?
One final extract to check your understanding

This guide is part of the English Language AO6 series:

Part 1 - Introducing AO6 and sentence demarcation
Part 2 - Getting the punctuation marks
Part 3 - Using varied sentences and ambitious vocabulary

Reminders from part 1 — 5 key questions

In the first 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.

In the second guide, we went through the two punctuation questions.

1. What is a sentence and how do you know when one starts and ends in order to “consistently” do demarcation accurately? Identify the clauses in your sentences; then check you’ve not joined any of them together with commas.

2. How do you accurately do the punctuation that students often get wrong? Learn the rules for apostrophes and commas.

3. How do you use a “wide range” of punctuation? Use dashes and semi-colons in your writing.

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 final guide, we’ll cover the last two questions about sentence variation and ambitious vocabulary.

Q4: How do you create varied “sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures” with “control of agreement”? (AO6 — bullet points 3 and 4)

We’re getting into the more “artistic” parts of this assessment objective now, the parts that are not just about learning the rules. Writing good sentences is, in our view, the most important part of writing well, and talented writers can just write brilliant sentences without thinking about “the rules”.

However, there are some things that any writer can do to help with these parts of AO6, and we’ll run through them now.

Control of agreement (bullet point 4)

The first thing we’ll cover is what the mark scheme means by “control of agreement” in bullet point 4. This is about using correct grammar, and “agreement” is a slightly technical grammatical term. However, for most students getting this right boils down to two things:

Don’t mix up the tenses in your writing. The most common way that students get this wrong is by switching between the present tense and the past tense by accident. This happens more often when students try to write stories in the present tense, which is why we recommend using the 3rd person limited past tense narrative voice. But it’s something you need to be aware of and to check for when you proofread your work in exams: have you got the tenses right?
Make sure you use plural and singular forms correctly. This is the other form of grammatical agreement that students sometimes get wrong. Consider a pack of wolves, for example. There are many wolves in a pack, so that sounds like it should be plural, but it is a pack, which is singular.
- A pack of wolves was circling the camp. This has correct agreement.
- *A pack of wolves were circling the camp. This is grammatically incorrect — the agreement is incorrect.
There are lots of examples like this, where students inadvertently use the plural form when they should use the singular one. It’s not always easy to spot this, and the increasing use of “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun complicates things a bit here, but the edge-cases aren’t the ones that will lose you marks for AO6, so you don’t need to worry too much about them. Just be mindful of whether you’ve used the correct verb form (singular or plural).

Using varied sentence forms (bullet point 3)

In essence, using “varied sentence forms” means mixing up the clauses and phrases in varied ways in your sentences. (We discussed clauses in detail in the first guide in this series, so we’re just going to assume you know what they are in this guide.)

There are websites that provide things like “15 great sentence structures to make your writing more sophisticated” but we don’t really approve of this. The problem with learning these stock structures (e.g. Start the sentence with 3 adverbs: Gently, kindly, urgently, she hugged her sister) is that these structures have become cliches, and they sound artificial. They don’t make you sound like a good writer; they just make you sound like someone who has looked at one of these websites. To do well in this part of the AO6 mark scheme, you need to be more natural in your writing.

There are, however, some simple things you can do to help you meet this part of the assessment objective in a more natural way:

Fronted subordinate clauses. This is an easy one. You would have learnt about this at primary school. You can vary your sentence openings by fronting the subordinate clause.
For example: Because she knew it would hurt him, she said yes.
Embedded relative clauses. Embedding clauses (and adverbial phrases — see below) in the middle of a sentence is the best way to meet this part of the assessment objective. You’ll need to use commas here to separate the embedded clause from the rest of the sentence (we discussed this in the second guide in this series in the bit about “non-essential phrases”). The easiest type of clause to embed is the relative clause.
For example: The man, who looked like he was close to tears, stood up.
Embedded adverbial phrases, including participle phrases. The easiest thing to embed is some kind of adverbial phrase, including a participle phrase (e.g. one using a present participle). This generally requires commas too. Usually it involves putting the adverbial phrase that could be used as a sentence starter in the middle of the sentence instead.
For example: She knew, on today of all days, that it was the right thing to do.
Participle phrases can be particularly effective for this.
For example: She ran, not thinking about herself or her own wellbeing, straight towards the volcano.
In both of these examples the adverbial phrase could have been used as a sentence starter, which can also be effective, but being able to embed these kind of phrases is more sophisticated in sentence structure terms.
Using minor sentences (sparingly). We almost didn’t include this one on the list because it risks losing marks for poor sentence demarcation (see the first guide in the series). However, when used sparingly, minor sentence (e.g. words or phrases that are not a full clause) can be an effective way to vary the way you construct your sentences.
For example (the underlined bit is the minor sentence): Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all.
If you can do this from time to time, in such a way that your marker can see that you’re doing it deliberately and not making a grammatical mistake, then it can be effective, especially as minor sentences are short and punchy. But be careful.
Use some very long sentences. If you’re able to write long sentences, with multiple clauses, then it’s very likely that you will use varied sentences forms by accident — or out of necessity. There is a risk here, not least when it comes to sentence demarcation — often students attempt to write long sentences but end up comma-splicing several shorter sentences instead — but if you can write in grammatically accurate long sentences, then the formal variety will usually take care of itself.

These 5 methods are all simple ways to use more varied sentence forms.

However, the best way to understand how to write really good sentences is to read sentences written by professional writers and look at how they are constructed. The last part of this section of the guide contains 10 sentences that use “varied sentence forms” in natural and interesting ways. Read through them and look at how they are constructed:

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.
They loll on the grass in quiet groups, men and women of various races, mostly in their twenties and thirties, confident, cheerful, unoppressed, fit from private gym workouts, at home in their city.
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.
In the bedroom darkness, while Jack at her side quietly snored, she seemed to peer over a cliff edge.
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 thing you can do with sentences like these — or with ones you find in your own reading — is to literally steal the sentence structure (not the actual sentence) and practise writing other sentences that use the same structure, but with different words. This is pretty easy to do, and if you really struggle with writing varied and complex sentences, you can have a few “interesting sentence structures” in you arsenal, ready to use in the exam, whatever question you’re asked to write. This can only help with your mark for AO6.

Another way is just to practise writing sentences, for fun. This is more noble. Just spend some time writing sentences with interesting structures. You can get a computer program or the AI of your choice to correct the punctuation and grammar, if need be, while you practise, 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]”? (AO6 — bullet point 6)

Let’s start with some ground rules about vocabulary:

Using ambitious vocabulary is not about getting back to primary school ‘wow-words’. We don’t want to see a plethora of azure skies with gargantuan sapphire suns shimmering iridescently over the emerald grass. We want something more now that you’re at GCSE.
There is no such thing as “good” words or “bad” words — there are just words that mean different things, all of which are useful for communication, or they wouldn’t exist. No words are inherently better or worse than others.
However, there are words that have a very general meaning, and words that have a very specific meaning. The foundational principle for effective vocabulary use is using more of the specific words, when the specific meaning is the meaning you intend, and fewer of the general words.

We’ll run through this in terms of 4 things you should do in the rest of this section of the guide.

Specificity vs. clarity — a quick sidebar discussion

Technically speaking, the general words are called hypernyms and the specific words are called hyponyms. These are two words with very specific meanings. We’ll keep referring to these as general words and specific words, though, because that’ll make it easier for you to understand (the technical terms are annoyingly similar to one another — like the names of characters in Shakespeare’s plays). We’ve mentioned this here because it’s a neat illustration of the fact that specificity is not the only important factor in effective vocabulary choice: clarity matters too. You need to use words that your audience will understand. However, for the purposes of writing at GCSE, it’s unlikely you’ll have a problem with this since you’ll always be writing for fairly adult and educated audiences — you’re never going to be asked to write a children’s story. For that reason, we won’t get bogged down with clarity considerations here — make your vocabulary as esoteric as you like. (We’ll leave you to look up ‘esoteric’ — it is an esoteric word.)

1. Using specific rather than general words — the easy bit

In essence, using “ambitious vocabulary" means using specific vocabulary. It means using one word (if one word is available) instead of multiple words. This is very easy to illustrate and understand. Let’s take a very general word — the verb ‘walk’ — and compare it with some more specific synonyms:

The man walked slowly and tentatively into the room
The man edged into the room.
The man walked reluctantly and miserably into the room
The man trudged into the room.
The man walked briskly and confidently into the room.
The man strode into the room.

Clearly, it’s better if you can use one specific word (e.g. trudged) rather than several more general words (e.g. walked reluctantly and miserably) to create the specific meaning you want to convey in sentences like these.

That’s one key part of using “ambitious vocabulary” — using fewer specific words rather than a greater number of general words which convey the same meaning. This is relatively straightforward, especially when it comes to adjective/noun and adverb/verb groupings like the ones above.

2. Matching the words to the context — the slightly trickier bit

The next thing you need to make sure you do is match the vocabulary you choose to the piece you are writing. Consider this passage:

At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was splashing along a rising road turned to soup by the rain. On either side lay emerald fields and pastureland, the horizons guarded by a line of sombre hills under the azure sky.

Here, we have two nicely written sentences, with some suitably specific vocabulary in them. However, not all the words work. The mood here is mostly gloomy (splashing, soup, guarded, sombre), but in there we’ve got a couple of words that don’t fit: emerald and azure. They’re both too bright and, literally, colourful to fit in this gloomy passage — they’re not well-chosen. Consider this alternative:

At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was splashing along a rising road turned to soup by the rain. On either side lay bare fields and pastureland, the horizons guarded by a line of sombre hills under the leaden sky.

These two words work much better in this passage because they match the mood. They’re not inherently better as words, but they’re better word choices for that sentence.

This is another really important consideration with vocabulary choice: the words have to sound right in the context in which you use them.

This can also happen if you drop fancy words into an otherwise plain bit of writing. Consider this clunker:

The loquacious boy arrived at the house with his supercilious friend.

This is not good writing, and the addition of loquacious and supercilious doesn’t help — if anything, it makes it worse. You’re not going to get good marks for vocabulary if you just crowbar in “fancy” words that don’t fit with the rest of the sentence or the rest of the piece in general. And this is what makes this part slightly trickier. This why it’s about more than ‘wow-words’. You need to use specific words in an appropriate context.

3. Knowing the words — the really tricky bit

There is another aspect, too, which we can’t ignore. Consider the following sentences, particularly the words and phrases underlined:

Behind the ship, the far side of the bay rises to a low brown ridge similar to this, and beyond that ridge is arranged a row of white pinnacles — the tips of icebergs grounded in a hidden inlet.
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere; it absolves the thinking classes of solutions.
His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolved of its creases, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do.
He was perhaps a cynic and his withers were unwrung at many of the misfortunes that affect men, but he had a peculiar feeling for youth, perhaps because it promised so much and lasted too short a time, and it seemed to him that there was in the bitterness it experiences when reality breaks upon its illusions something more pathetic than in many graver ills.

It doesn’t make sense to suggest that all you need to do to use vocabulary like these writers (Robert Macfarlane, Ian McEwan, Samantha Harvey and Somerset Maugham, respectively) is to apply the simple principles above (e.g. use specific words in an appropriate context). There’s something else going on here too.

To use words like these, in phrases and sentences like these, you have to know a lot of words, and you have to understand the complicated concepts that lie behind words like these. This is much harder to do than the first two principles we discussed.

And there’s no shortcut to this.

The only way to do it is to read, look up the words you don’t know, and then try and use them in your speech and writing. This is obviously not quick or easy to do. It is, in fact, the work of a lifetime.

4. A pragmatic solution to this

There is a kind of middle-ground, though. We started this discussion of vocabulary by rejecting the idea of “good” and “bad” words, but we’re going to finish by being pragmatic about this.

It’s probably worthwhile for you to learn some “fancy” words — words that are seldom used, and which have specific meanings — to use in your assessed writing. We have a section of the website focussed on vocabulary learning, so we won’t suggest specific words here, but that part of the site is a good place to start. (You can think of them as ‘wow-words’, if you like, though choose some new ones — don’t use the primary school ones.) You also need to be able to use them correctly and in an appropriate context.

5. What does it take to count as “extensive”?

However, this is still not quite enough, which is where the “extensive” part of the mark scheme comes in. Let’s say you learn three “fancy” words (verisimilitude, crepuscular and galvanise) and you get all three correctly into your piece of writing. This certainly won’t hurt your AO6 mark, but it doesn’t guarantee you the marks about “extensive” use of ambitious vocabulary, unless the vocabulary in the rest of your piece is more than basic. This part of the mark scheme is very hard to cheat. Having some “fancy” words at your disposal is definitely worthwhile, but it’s no guarantee if you don’t have a reasonable general vocabulary.

To really excel at this — and this is why we’ve left it to last in these guides — you do need to read regularly, ensuring that what you read is sufficiently challenging (e.g. books for adults rather than YA books). That’s the only effective way to truly broaden your general vocabulary. We have a section of the website about reading too, but mostly the website can’t help you with this last part. Just read some books.

Recapping the 5 key questions with brief answers

2. How do you accurately do the punctuation that students often get wrong? Learn the rules for apostrophes and commas.

3. How do you use a “wide range” of punctuation? Use dashes and semi-colons in your writing.

4. How do you create “varied sentence forms” with “complex grammatical structures” and with “control of agreement”? Mix up your clauses and phrases in interesting ways, especially by embedding clauses/adverbial phrases; make sure you don’t mix up your tenses or your plurals/singulars.

5. What is “ambitious” vocabulary and how do you use it “extensive[ly]”? Ambitious words are words with specific meanings used in an appropriate context; use sufficiently regularly for it to count as extensive. You should also read books and look up words you don’t know.

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?
Are dashes or semi-colons used?
How are the sentences constructed? How are clauses and phrases combined? Are there any embedded clauses/phrases?
What vocabulary do you think counts as ambitious here? Where are the words with specific meanings?

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. 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; it was detailed. It was a tapestry of air.