Writing Task 2: Opinion (Agree/Disagree) Essay: Question 2
Syllabus W.task2
Social media platforms have become the main way that many young people communicate and maintain friendships.
To what extent do you agree or disagree that social media does more to damage young people's mental health than to benefit their social lives?
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 essay commits immediately to one side of the stated comparison (“damage… considerably more than they benefit”) rather than drifting into a generic, undecided discussion of social media, and every paragraph (including the conclusion, which explicitly acknowledges a genuine benefit before restating why it is outweighed) stays anchored to that same weighing exercise the prompt demands.
Coherence & Cohesion
The two body paragraphs are built around clearly distinct mechanisms (social comparison, then shallow versus genuine connection), each introduced by a topic sentence that names its role in the argument. Cohesion is achieved through referencing chains (“this convenience”, “a pattern that…”, “her”) rather than a string of formulaic connectors, and the semicolon in the final body paragraph links two closely related ideas into one fluent sentence.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is precise and appropriately academic without being unnatural: “corrosive effect”, “curated images”, “shallow substitutes”, “hollow connection”. Near-synonyms are used to avoid repetition (e.g. “damage”, “cost”, “corrosive effect” all referring to harm), and collocations are consistently accurate (“mounting evidence”, “build resilience”).
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
The response shows confident control of complex structures: a non-defining relative clause (“a pattern that had nothing to do with… and everything to do with…”), parallel structure across two nouns joined by “rather than”, and a conditional-style concessive clause in the conclusion (“although… I remain convinced that…”). No grammatical errors are present.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the single most common band 6 error on this exact prompt is writing two balanced paragraphs (one for harm, one for benefit) and never actually stating, as the prompt requires, which one outweighs the other.