Writing Task 2: Advantages & Disadvantages Essay: Question 8
Syllabus W.task2
Software, entertainment and even household appliances are increasingly sold through ongoing monthly subscriptions rather than a single upfront payment that grants permanent ownership.
Do the advantages of paying through ongoing subscriptions outweigh the disadvantages?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Response
The introduction paraphrases the prompt and states an unambiguous verdict (“I believe the disadvantages… outweigh the advantages”) that is sustained without contradiction. Each body paragraph develops one genuinely distinct point (lower barrier to access and continuous updates, then cumulative cost and loss of ownership) each anchored in a specific, fully developed example, and the conclusion weighs the two sides explicitly (“gradual, often unnoticed financial cost” versus “short-term convenience”) rather than simply repeating the opening.
Coherence & Cohesion
The essay moves logically from acknowledging genuine benefits to overturning them, signposted by “The main advantage is…” and “However, this convenience masks…”. Reference chains (“this convenience”, “this dependency”, “it”) tie sentences together smoothly, and the colleague’s example is integrated directly into the paragraph’s financial argument rather than appended separately.
Lexical Resource
Register is consistently formal and precise: “lower the barrier to accessing”, “masks a serious long-term cost”, “little recourse”. The essay avoids repeating “expensive” or “cheap” by instead varying the evaluation through phrases such as “add up to far more than”, “cumulative cost” and “far greater burden”.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A wide range of structures is used with full control: a non-restrictive relative-style comparison (“a subscription that seems affordable month to month can, over several years, add up…”), a result clause (“the moment he stopped paying, he lost access…”), and varied sentence openings throughout. There are no errors of tense, agreement or article use anywhere in the response.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging band 6 error on this prompt is praising the convenience of subscriptions in general terms without ever quantifying or comparing the real cumulative cost against a one-off purchase, which leaves the financial half of the argument underdeveloped.