Writing Task 2: Discussion (Both Views) Essay: Question 1
Syllabus W.task2
Some companies expect their staff to remain reachable by email or phone outside their normal working hours. Some people believe this is necessary to maintain productivity and provide a responsive service to clients. Other people believe that this practice damages employees' wellbeing and blurs the boundary between work and personal life.
Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
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 both views precisely and states a clear, qualified position (“treating constant availability as a general expectation causes far more damage… than it delivers in business benefit”) that is sustained through to the conclusion’s practical recommendation (a “rotating on-call system”). Both body paragraphs are developed with a specific, concrete example, Halvorsen Freight’s logistics coordinator and the friend at the advertising agency, giving the two views genuinely comparable depth before the candidate’s own opinion is stated.
Coherence & Cohesion
Topic sentences clearly flag whose view is under discussion (“Those who defend the practice point to…”, “Critics, however, point out that…”), and “however” cleanly signals the pivot between the two views. Reference chains such as “this blurring of boundaries” and “an informal expectation of constant reachability” tie ideas back to earlier points without relying on a mechanical string of linking words.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is precise and topic-appropriate throughout: “disengage from work”, “blurring of boundaries”, “rotating on-call system”. Near-synonyms avoid repetition (e.g. “out-of-hours contact”, “constant availability”, “constant reachability” all referring to the same idea), and collocations are used accurately (“protects revenue and client trust”, “sustains the productivity”).
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
The response shows confident control of complex structures: a non-defining relative clause (“a coordinator who answers a single evening call…”), a passive participle clause (“defined in advance through a rotating on-call system”), and varied sentence openings across paragraphs. There are no errors of tense, agreement or word form anywhere in the response.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is developing the business-need view in full while reducing the wellbeing view to a token mention of “stress”. A band 9 discussion essay must give both views genuinely comparable depth before the candidate’s own opinion is given.