GCSE English: Planning and Organising Extended Writing

Good ideas lose marks when they arrive in the wrong order. The writing assessment objective AO5 asks students not only to communicate clearly and imaginatively but also to 'organise information and ideas, using structural and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion', and AO6 rewards accurate spelling and punctuation. In AQA's papers, for example, each extended writing task carries 24 marks for content and organisation and 16 for technical accuracy. This material trains the organisation that sits behind a confident piece of writing.

It starts with the quick plan made in the first minutes of a timed task: fixing your view or the shape of your story, putting four to six paragraph ideas in a logical order, including a counter-argument where you are arguing, and deciding the ending before you begin. It then covers paragraphing – when to start a new paragraph (a new idea, time, place, speaker or perspective), how a topic sentence sets the focus, and how a deliberately short, even one-line, paragraph can create emphasis.

Next come discourse markers. You practise choosing the connective that matches the real relationship between two sentences – adding, contrasting, cause and effect, sequencing or concluding – rather than scattering 'furthermore' at random. Cohesion across the whole piece is built through paragraph openings that refer back, pronoun reference, repeated key words and, in narrative, a cyclical structure that echoes the opening at the end. Finally, the material covers proofreading in the last minutes: spotting comma splices and run-on sentences, homophones, missing apostrophes and capital letters, and correcting them neatly.

All examples are short original sentences and openings printed inside the questions. The material offers a quiz, flashcards on the key techniques, a written work sheet in which you plan, reorder, link and proofread short pieces, and an oral exam in which the examiner gives you a task and asks you to talk through your plan, your paragraph links and your ending.

• Make a quick, useful plan for a timed writing task, including the ending
• Decide when to start a new paragraph and write clear topic sentences
• Choose discourse markers that match the relationship between ideas
• Build cohesion with linked paragraph openings, reference and a cyclical structure
• Proofread for comma splices, run-ons, homophones, apostrophes and capital letters

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE GCSE English language subject content and assessment objectives (DFE-00232-2013: AO5 – organise information and ideas using structural and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion; AO6 – accurate spelling and punctuation); mark split quoted as an example from the AQA GCSE English Language (8700) specification, version 1.5.