Life without IT

Review of essay

Rating: 4 star(s)

Response to the question

This is a very confident Writing to Argue piece, which sees the candidate discuss the importance and reliance on information technology with his father. The candidate cleverly utilises first person address mixed with second person, allowing the piece to read as if a novel, making it pleasant, witty, personal and above all interesting to an examiner who has to mark dozens of these essays. The use of rhetoric helps convey the messages the candidate wishes to express as well as providing humour to make this a good piece, worthy of a middle band B grade for GCSE.

Level of analysis

The Level of Analysis here is fair, but by no means perfect. I like the reference to historical figures and respected intellectuals wanting to develops electronic methods of doing laborious tasks as early as 1940. But the candidate often feels like they are going overboard with the rubbing the modern technology and it's pros in his father's face, whilst forgetting to provide some cold hard facts to help fortify their argument. Some statistics about the number of computers per household or Apple products sold in the last few years wouldn't go amiss, and neither would the statistics of social network users. Elsewhere, voice of the expert could be brought in, to break up the sound of a snotty teenager in the readers' heads, and more linguistically-orientated rhetorical devices (aside from the rhetorical questions - there's plenty of those) like similes and metaphors (possibly about the reliance on IT - e.g. "every modern man's bread and butter"?). With this, the candidate could reach five stars and pull the answer up to a grade A.

Quality of writing

The Quality of Written Communication is good. The candidate has no major issues with regards to spelling, misuses of grammar or punctuation errors. To assist in bringing the essay up to a grade A though, I would recommend more challenging and complex sentence structures and punctuation points (e.g. semi-colons and colons) to give the examiner an idea of the confidence with which you can use the English language's more complex tools in order to shape meaning, but at least there are no mistakes here.