Paper 1 Question 5 AQA English Language Part 2

We're now going to talk about AO6, technical accuracy. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of students don't pay enough attention to technical accuracy. They make mistakes and they allow their mark to slip on this one and it pulls down their mark overall, gutting. So, what I'm going to talk to you about is how to make sure that you are demonstrating as much as possible the high level of English here. However, this is the big asterisk I have have to put on my advice for this one. I don't know how well you write in English. You might be a native English speaker, born here, and not have very good spelling and not have very good grammar. You might be a student who's only been living and studying in England for a few

months and you've had to learn English from scratch in a few months. And again, I don't know how good your grammar is. I don't know how good your spelling is. So, the problem here is that the limit to my advice is how good you are at writing in the English language, in your spelling, in your punctuation, and in your grammar. So, if you know that that is a weak area for you, that you're not too good at writing in English with grammar and spelling, that's something you're going to want to work on. And to do that, you're going to want to treat English, if you don't already, even if you're a native speaker, treat English like a foreign language. Treat it like something where you need to learn the rules to make sure

you learn it correctly. There's loads of stuff out there that's going to help you to do that, whether it be textbooks or YouTube videos of people teaching English as a foreign language, but they are your people. No shade, no shame in being a native English speaker that looks at these videos to up your grammar, because I can tell you right now that when you make sure you know the rules of the English language, not only are you going to be able to write it accurately, but you are going to know the English language better than most English people. With that in mind, let's start looking through the bullet points and see how we can give that advice for where you can specifically try to target the higher marks. The first bullet point

is exactly what I was saying before. How accurate you are here is going to come down to how accurate you are in the English language. If you write the English language incredibly accurately, ticking that to the highest level is going to be a piece of cake. If you don't write in the English language very accurately, ticking that box is going to be much harder for you. But sentence demarcation is basically about the accuracy of your punctuation. Now students are usually fine with full stops. Where they most commonly mess up is commas. Commas are a really important foundation punctuation mark, but students often don't know how to use them. Usually because they were taught in primary school that it's every time

you want to take a breath, and that's not really accurate. So if you're going to concentrate your revision on just trying to perfect one punctuation mark, make it the comma, cuz I can pretty much guarantee that's the one you're doing wrong. You also want to make sure for the second bullet point on the range of punctuation that you are using three punctuation marks. Semicolon, colon, and the dash. All three of those in your story at least once. Do not use the colon and semicolon to introduce a list. That's a trick that a lot of teachers try to teach their students. It doesn't work. It doesn't fit with the style of fiction writing. You want to use colons and semicolons the way they're typically

meant to be used to link two main clauses. Now all of what I've just said might not make a lot of sense if you don't know how to use a semicolon and colon. And again, for that, you're going to go have to do the work. That is beyond the scope of this video, and there is loads of stuff out there. Um I would recommend a website called uh I think it's called like chompchomp.com. It's like grammar bites. Um you can have a look at their information on how to use semicolons, colons. Type it into YouTube how to use a colon, all that good stuff, and you'll get resources. But you need to make sure semicolon, colon, and dash are in your writing, and most importantly, they're being used accurately. I cannot tell you how many

times I've had students try to use those punctuation marks, but they use it wrong, and they therefore don't get the credit that they deserve. So make sure you're using them, and you're using them accurately. Our next bullet point is absolutely one we can work towards in advance of the exam. And that is about using a range of sentence forms. Now, you might be thinking sentence forms as in like long sentences, short sentences. It's much more than that. It's about the sentence structure, where you place your subordinate clauses if you ever use complex sentences. And again, if I'm using terminology here, and you're a native speaker thinking, "What the is a subordinate clause? What?" You need to go do some research.

You also need to have a look at a great resource that I cannot take credit for. Um it's made by a guy called I want to say Alan Peat. If you just type into Google 25 ways to start a sentence, his resource is going to come up at the top of Google, and it is great. It is exactly what the title suggests. It's 25 ways to structure your sentences. You'll find this actually a really useful resource for paper two question five as well, because a lot of the sentence structures work better for nonfiction than they do fiction. If you are hardcore committed, you could memorize all 25, and then you could try and commit yourself to using all 25 in your writing. Now, I'll be honest and say that's the strategy of just throwing it all in that

you only want to go for if your goal for this exam is to pass or perhaps get a grade six. If you're going for grade seven to nine, you don't just want to chuck in a load of different sentence structures for the sake of it. You want to make sure you're doing it as conscious crafting. It's for a reason. It's for an effect. So, you would still learn loads of different ways to structure your sentence, but you wouldn't just make sure you use them all. You try to kind of be more refined and think about it. If you're looking to pass this exam, if you're looking for the grade five, grade six, cram. Get all 25 in there. Get them in there twice if you can. Make sure you're really, really varying the way that you

structure your sentences. This also works perfectly for our next bullet point about using standard English. Now, the using standard English just means that you're writing with the correct grammar for the English language. So, that one I can't really give advice on. It's going to come down to how accurate you are in writing the English language. But that second part about the controlled grammatical structures and the complex grammatical structures, that you will be able to achieve by using a lot of the different 25 ways to structure a sentence because what you're showing the examiner is you know what the grammar should look like for lots of different sentence types. So again, I really recommend learning lots

of different ways to structure your sentence and then using lots of those different ways in your writing. The last two bullet points here I'm not going to talk about for very long because first of all, the spelling is not one I can really give advice on. That again is just over to you and how accurate you are with writing the English language, but then also the vocabulary So here again, everything that I said before back with AO5 about vocabulary applies exactly here, too. If you tick the box in AO5, you'll tick the box here in AO6. That is why I cannot understate the importance of thinking about your vocabulary, of trying to learn and use more sophisticated and ambitious language in your writing. And not just telling me,

"It was a hot day," she said as she walked to the big shop. Make sure you are trying to use more sophisticated vocabulary appropriately and for effect. Overall then, you can see that actually this question is challenging because of how much stuff you have to think about when you write your answer. That is why again, the worst thing you could do is just start writing. The most important thing for you to do is to plan. Take a moment and ask yourself, "What are all the boxes I need to tick and how am I going to make sure I tick them? Where am I going to vary my punctuation? Where am I going to vary my sentence structure? What's my theme going to be? What setting am I going to describe? What am I going to contrast? How am I

going to contrast it with transition or with flashbacks? How am I going to make sure that I paragraph logically and correctly?" You need to think about all of that before you write your story. So taking five, even 10 minutes of the 45 is 100% worth it. You just have to make sure that you remember before the exam all the things you need to plan. So let's go through that now. Let's start with the plot. You need to plan what your theme's going to be and therefore what small action is going to be used to explore your theme. After that, you are then able to plan out your paragraphs and the order you're going to tell that story in. The next part is figuring out how you're going to flesh out that story with

description, with action, and with dialogue. You need to make sure that you've planned out across that story you're going to tell. Where is your description of setting going to be? Where is your description of character going to be? Where is your action? Where is your dialogue? Remembering a dialogue is going to mean you're going to have to have more than one character at some point cuz they got to have a conversation with somebody. You also need to think about what's your contrast going to be. Are you going to go transition? Are you going to go flashback? And make sure that you've planned out with that paragraph structure how you're going to have that contrast and that uh transition or flashback in the writing. The next thing

you want to do is think about the small details. Where are you going to use those punctuation marks? Where are you going to get in your sophisticated vocabulary? Where are you going to get in your different sentence structures? Make sure you don't have to put pen to paper for this. You don't have to write it out, I will use semicolon here, but you need to have thought about it. You need to have thought through where you're going to make sure you've got all these things. Once you've planned all that out, it's time to write. Once you've written that out, make sure you save yourself 5 minutes at the end to go back over what you've written, to go back over that plan. Did you do it all? Did you cover

everything? And make sure you've got all the kind of as many of the kind of boxes ticked as humanly possible cuz ultimately at this point you got 5 minutes left. There's a limit to how much more you're going to be able to write. But, you also want to proofread. Check your spelling. Check your grammar. Check your punctuation. If you made a mistake because you didn't know you were making a mistake, fair enough. That's where your ability to write in the English language is, that is what it is. But, if you make a mistake because you didn't spot you made a mistake, because you were trying to write really fast and you just forgot to capitalize a letter, or you forgot to put a full stop in, you are going to kick yourself. Because that

is a super simple thing that you could have fixed, and you didn't spot, and it would have pulled down your mark. So, take 5 minutes at the end to proofread for spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. With that in mind, of the 45 minutes you've got, if you're going to spend at least five planning, and five proofreading, how much does that leave us with? Quick maths. Do some maths with the English. 35 minutes, okay? You're going to have 35 minutes, which is again why I'm going to stress one more time, that action needs to be small. You have got 35 minutes. You are not going to be able to have two people meet, fall in love, have a baby, one of them get into the accident and have amnesia, the other one

earn back their love, and then it turns out the child wasn't actually theirs, they had an affair, and so she kills her, and then it's the end of the story. You're not going to be able to do that in 35 minutes. Keep your plot small. Keep it as a snapshot of a moment. Just the walk to school. Just making a cup of tea for your wife in the morning. Just walking down the street through a park and thinking about the beauty of the world. Keep the action small, and the meaning big. Think about your word choice. Think about your vocabulary. Think about the linguistic devices you are using. And you got this.