Coursework: Planning, Drafting and Redrafting: Question 3

Worked solution

Assessment focus

This question tests the specific redrafting skill of cutting redundancy and inflated wording without losing meaning or the appropriate degree of hedging. Recognising that the “best” redraft is not automatically the shortest one, but the one that removes what is genuinely redundant while keeping what the sentence actually needs to say.

Why B is correct

Option B removes every redundant element of the original (the doubled hedge (“In my opinion, I think”), the padded phrase “in this modern day and age that we live in”, and the vague intensifier “really big massive”) while keeping the sentence’s real content intact: social media (subject), has a significant impact (claim, with one clear intensifier rather than a stacked pair), on many teenagers’ mental health (the specific group and the appropriately hedged scale, “many” rather than “all”).

Why the distractors are wrong

• A still opens with “In my opinion, I think”, the exact redundant doubling the original sentence needed removing, so barely improves it.
• C changes the meaning by adding new, unsupported claims not in the original (“everybody knows”, “obviously a huge problem for society”) and remains wordy and informal in tone. A genuine redraft should not introduce new assertions.
• D cuts too much: it drops “teenagers” (making the claim about everyone, not the specific group the original was about) and drops any hedge on scale, turning a careful claim into an unsupported universal one.

Mark scheme

• 1 mark for selecting B.
• 0 marks for any other option. No partial credit, since this is a discrete single-answer selection question.