This persuasive writing guide for GCSE is designed to support teachers and students of CCEA English Language Unit 1 Writing for Purpose and Audience. Despite the title ‘Writing for Purpose and Audience’, the task is assessing students’ ability to write persuasively.
I hope this guide is helpful. Scroll to the bottom to download the printable guide for your own revision notes, or to photocopy for your class.
What is persuasive writing?
Persuasive writing is a form of non-fiction writing which aims to get the reader to agree with the writer’s point of view. Writing persuasively helps students to defend an argument, an important skill for academic study, if they go on to university. It also helps to build their confidence in formulating a point of view.
Persuasive writing can also be referred to as argumentative writing or discursive writing.
What exam boards require students to do persuasive writing at GCSE?
CCEA
I have mentioned already, this guide is written for my own CCEA GCSE students.
CCEA’s English Language Unit 1 Task 1 is called ‘writing for purpose and audience’. It asks students to write a persuasive response to an unseen topic for a specific audience. The task is worth 87 marks (there are 150 marks available for the whole paper).
WJEC
WJEC’s GCSE English Language Unit 3 Section B asks students to complete two persuasive writing tasks. Each one is worth 20 marks, so 40 in total (there are 80 marks available for the whole paper).
Will students know the topic, purpose and audience in advance of the exam?
For the first time in 2023, CCEA released Advanced Information for a number of subjects, including English Language GCSE. For Unit 1, CCEA told us that the audience would be your classmates. That’s it! Not much to go on! You can look at the document here.
WJEC also released similar information for their candidates, indicating that the focus for Unit 3 would be an article for the first task and a talk for the second. You can check the document here.
Where do we see persuasive writing?
In the real world, we are surrounded by persuasion. We see it on billboards, in advertisements, in politics, and in many aspects of our everyday lives, such as at home or at school. If you have ever tried to convince someone to do or give you something, then you are already more than a beginner.
Billboards
Political speeches
Job interviews
Advertising
Motivational speeches
Elections
Students will be familiar with the language of media and advertising from KS3 study. They tend to do well with this style of writing as they are using lively, exaggerated expressions and cultivating a positive relationship with their reader/audience. It can also be an emotive topic: students feel quite passionate about the topics that come up.
What topics could come up in GCSE persuasive writing?
In general, the topics students are asked to write about are topics they are familiar with. CCEA do not expect students to have memorised facts and statistics about a range of topics. Instead, they must write from their own ideas, opinions and experiences. Here are some past paper topics, and a few more that I think would be great to give to students:
- Should school uniforms be mandatory?
- Should students call their teachers by their first name?
- Should the whole world go vegan?
- Should the voting age be lowered to 16?
- Is social media harmful to young people?
- Should the legal drinking age be raised?
- Should homework be abolished?
- Is artificial intelligence ethical?
- Should junk food be banned from schools?
- Is climate change our responsibility to fix?
- Is technology making us more or less social?
Teaching ideas for persuasive writing
- Get students talking: debate the topics
- Double up the same written practice tasks with speaking and listening assessment (individual)
- Use a random name selector (try this one) to select topics and get students to persuade their partners for 30 seconds
- Watch famous persuasive speeches – try this site. Annotate and discuss what works. This is a great lead into Unit 3 Study of Spoken Language CA
What do students find difficult about persuasive writing?
1. Getting the right tone
A big part of the CCEA assessment is matching the style and tone of your writing to the audience. Sometimes the audience is your classmates but it could also be the examiner, the school community or a specific situation, for example a Primary 6 class. Students need to vary their tone, vocabulary and content to suit the audience.
I find that some students struggle to balance the need for formality (it’s an English exam) with a casual tone (to suit their classmates, for example). This takes practice for most students.
2. Writing accurately
As with all written tasks, students are assessed on a range of skills, but approximately a third of the marks in the CCEA, and half in WJEC, are awarded for accuracy of spelling, punctuation and grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure, etc.
3. Using a range of language devices to make the writing lively
A big part of the assessment of quality in this task is in the students’ ability to manipulate language to persuade. There are many mnemonics for persuasive language devices. Here’s mine: PASS ME A FOREST.
4. Developing detail
This task requires students to plan and take a well structured approach. The written response needs an introduction, main paragraphs which outline the main arguments and a conclusion. Each of the main paragraphs needs a clear point/topic sentence, giving the response a range of persuasive ideas. The CCEA task is allocated 55 minutes. There is an expectation of length: three sides of exam paper are included in the exam booklet. The best responses will be concise enough not to waffle on, but well developed enough to use the space to fully convince the reader.
I hope you found this guide useful. Let me know what else I can add, or what I have left out!
Download the guide here:
Check out the rest of the Persuasive Writing mini-series:
