Structuring an Extended Written Response: Question 5
Syllabus W1, W2
A student has written the following paragraph for a report on a town's new recycling scheme, but it reads as a list of disconnected facts rather than a fluent paragraph.
"The town introduced a new recycling scheme last year. The scheme sorts waste into five different bins. Sorting waste into five bins confuses some residents. Some residents put items in the wrong bins. Putting items in the wrong bins means the recycling plant has to sort some waste by hand. Sorting waste by hand costs the council extra money."
(a) Rewrite this paragraph to improve its cohesion, using pronouns or synonyms to avoid repetition, discourse markers to make relationships between ideas explicit, and varied sentence structures. Do not add new information. [6]
(b) Briefly explain two specific changes you made and why each improves the paragraph's cohesion. [2]
Show worked solution Hide worked solution
Worked solution
Assessment focus
This question tests whether a candidate can diagnose why a paragraph feels disjointed (repeated nouns, no signalled relationships between ideas, uniformly short sentences) and repair it using the specific tools of cohesion: pronoun/synonym reference, discourse markers, and sentence combining.
Model rewrite (a)
“Last year, the town introduced a new recycling scheme that sorts waste into five separate bins. This system, however, has confused some residents, who place items in the wrong bins. Consequently, the recycling plant must sort some of the waste by hand, which costs the council extra money.”
Explaining the changes (b)
- Subordination instead of six short, separate sentences: clauses such as “that sorts waste into five separate bins” and “who place items in the wrong bins” fold information from what were previously stand-alone sentences into a single sentence each, removing the repeated nouns (“the scheme”, “bins”, “residents”) that made the original feel like a list.
- Discourse markers signalling relationships: “however” signals the shift from describing how the scheme works to the problem it has caused (residents’ confusion), and “Consequently” signals the cause-and-effect link between residents’ mistakes and the extra cost to the council, relationships the original left the reader to infer from six unconnected simple sentences.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
- Writing “The town introduced a new recycling scheme and it sorts waste into five bins and this confuses some residents and…”, technically joined, but a run-on sentence rather than genuine subordination.
- Using “Similarly” before the sentence about residents putting items in the wrong bins, which misrepresents the relationship (this is a consequence of the confusion, not a similar, separate point).
- In part (b), writing only “I used better linking words” without identifying “Although” or “Consequently” specifically, or explaining which relationship each one clarifies.