Register and Tone for Audience and Purpose: Question 7

Worked solution

Assessment focus

This question tests two connected skills: recognising tone as the speaker’s attitude (a) and analysing how a specific technique of language helps create that tone for a listening audience (b), moving from identification to close analysis of effect.

Part (a): Tone

The tone is passionate and persuasive, the speaker wants to move her classmates to act, not just inform them. This is shown through the phrase “it made me determined to act”, which reveals personal conviction, and the direct call “Join me, and together we can clear our beach”, which pushes the audience towards action rather than simply describing a problem.

Part (b): Technique and effect

The opening rhetorical question, “Have you ever walked along our local beach and seen plastic tangled in the seaweed?”, draws the audience in by prompting them to recall a personal experience or picture the scene themselves, before the speaker reveals her own reaction. This makes listeners more likely to agree with her from the outset, rather than feeling lectured at.

Other creditable techniques include the inclusive pronouns “we”, “our” and “Join me”, which frame the clean-up as a shared responsibility rather than a demand aimed only at the listener, and the intensifier “every single day”, which raises the emotional stakes of the marine charities’ ongoing effort.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

• Writing “the tone is informal” in part (a), this describes register, not the speaker’s underlying attitude.
• In part (b), quoting a technique correctly but explaining its effect only in general terms (“it’s engaging”) without saying how it engages this particular audience of classmates being asked to volunteer.