How Unit 1 works

Unit 1 is an untiered written examination: 1 hour 45 minutes, 30% of your GCSE, five tasks.

• Section A: Writing for Purpose and Audience — one task. You are given a purpose, an audience and a form, and you write.
• Section B: Reading to Access Non-fiction and Media Texts — four tasks, two on each of the two texts. These are non-fiction and media texts: articles, leaflets, advertisements, web pages, reports.

Functional English: CCEA concentrates the functional aspects of English in Units 1 and 2. In plain terms, Unit 1 asks: can you read real-world texts critically, and can you write something a real reader would act on?

Writing for purpose and audience

The Section A learning outcomes are precise. You should be able to: write accurately and effectively; use an appropriate writing form; express ideas and/or information precisely and accurately; select vocabulary to persuade and/or inform the reader; and use accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation.

So before writing, fix three things:

• Form — letter, article, leaflet, speech, report, blog. Each looks different on the page.
• Audience — a head teacher, a council, a parent, other students. This sets your register.
• Purpose — to persuade, to inform, or to do both. Persuading needs feeling as well as reasons; informing needs clarity above all.

Quick self-test before you start: say the task back to yourself in one sentence — I am writing a letter to the council, as a student, to persuade them to fund a late bus. If you cannot, re-read the task.

Matching form to audience

Persuading and informing

CCEA singles out selecting vocabulary to persuade and/or inform. These are different jobs, and the words are different.

• To inform: precise nouns, exact figures, neutral verbs, clear sequencing. No exaggeration — accuracy is the persuasion.
• To persuade: direct address, a group of three, a concession you then answer, one concrete human example, and a clear ask at the end.
• Both, together: the strongest real-world writing informs precisely and then makes the reader feel the figure.

Reading non-fiction and media texts

Section B tests AO3. You should be able to: read and understand texts; recognise the effects of language choices; develop interpretations of writers ideas; and explain and evaluate how writers use linguistic, grammatical and structural features to influence the reader.

That final outcome names three kinds of feature — and students routinely only write about the first.

• Linguistic — word choice, imagery, emotive language, semantic fields, rhetorical devices.
• Grammatical — sentence types and length, tense, modal verbs (must, could), pronouns (we, they), the passive voice hiding who did it.
• Structural — the order of ideas, where the strongest point sits, subheadings, paragraph length, the final line.

Media texts add a fourth layer: presentational features — headline, strapline, image, caption, layout, colour, font size. They are evidence too, and they carry meaning: a photograph is an argument someone chose.

Grammatical, not just linguistic

Which kind of feature is it?

Tap a feature, then tap the type it belongs to.

Developing an interpretation

CCEA asks you to develop interpretations — not to list features. A developed interpretation has three moves.

The evaluation step is the one that separates the top band: after explaining the effect, judge it. The effect is powerful but fragile — it depends entirely on the reader never asking who was not quoted.

Which answer is developed?

Feature to effect

Tap a feature on the left, then tap the effect it has on the reader.

Comparing the two texts

Section B gives you two texts with two tasks on each. Even when a task is on one text only, reading them against each other sharpens what you notice.

• Same event, different frame. Ask what each text wants you to do — buy, vote, worry, donate, ignore.
• Compare the evidence. One text may use statistics, the other an anecdote. Neither is automatically stronger — but each aims at a different part of the reader.
• Compare the reader being imagined. A leaflet for parents and a post aimed at teenagers can argue for the same thing in completely different registers.
• Use comparative connectives — whereas, by contrast, similarly — so the comparison is on the page and not just in your head.

Answering the task that was set

Timing and accuracy

One hour and forty-five minutes, five tasks. The single most common Unit 1 mistake is spending so long on Section A that Section B is written in a sprint.

• Split the paper deliberately. Check the marks on your paper and give each task time in proportion to its marks — then hold the line.
• Plan Section A for three minutes. Form, audience, purpose, then four points and an ending.
• Annotate the Section B texts as you read them, marking language, structure and presentation separately.
• Save five minutes to proof-read. Accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation are named in the Section A outcomes — they are marks, not manners.

Handwriting matters more than you think: an examiner who cannot read a word cannot credit it.

Where is the writing task?

The shape of a persuasive piece

Whatever form you are given, a persuasive or informative piece needs a spine the reader can feel.

• Open with the stake. Why should this reader care in the first ten seconds?
• Three developed points, strongest last. Each gets evidence, a consequence and a human face.
• Concede, then answer. Naming the objection before your reader does is what makes you sound fair rather than shrill.
• Ask for something. The commonest weak ending is a summary. A strong ending is a request: fund it, review it, vote for it.

Precision persuades: a lot of students is forgettable; three hundred and forty students is an argument.

Concede and rebut

Reading a media text like an analyst

Media texts do their persuading before you read a word. Work through the page in this order.

• The image. Who is in it, who is not, what angle are we looking from, and what emotion are we handed?
• The headline and strapline. What is asserted as fact and what is smuggled in as assumption?
• The layout. What is at the top, what is buried, what is in the box you cannot avoid?
• The caption. Captions tell you how to read the picture — they are the most quietly manipulative words on the page.
• Only then, the body text. By now you already know what it wants you to think.

Write it up as evidence: the photograph is taken from below, so the developers loom over the reader is an analytical point about a presentational feature — exactly what the outcome asks for.

The big ideas to know

You have now covered both sections of Unit 1 and the skills the examiner is looking for. Press Finish to see your score.