AQA AS English Language - 23rd May 2016

what is meant by a primary and secondary purpose? last minute thoughts. reply would be good thanks

Okay that was not as hard as I thought but I nearly ran out of time.

Yeah, timing is definitely an issue in this exam. Barely had time to read over my answers!

Did you struggle with the last question as I was barely able to complete it within a certain time frame, I barely scrapped it.

I felt like I came to a decisive conclusion albeit there was plenty more I could have written about it. I tried to leave myself five minutes to read over my answers at the end and managed to scrape two, but I didn't have enough time to read my final answer. I felt my final answer wasn't as developed as my first two, but I was rather proud of my first two and seeing as they were worth five marks more a piece, I guess it'll kind of work out? AQA really ought to accommodate with an extra ten minutes. I know that quite a lot of my friends didn't finish or left a paragraph half-complete!

True. I preferred text A to text B, it was easier to discuss. However I found the topic of cycling so boring.

Oh yeah, text A was much nicer! The topic, for me, was okay? But that's probably because I absolutely hate cars (I'll probably never learn to drive!) and, consequently, my preferred mode of transport is bike. I didn't like text B because it was really quite elitist and I don't like seeing those kinds of things, but I guess in a way it gave me that to talk about in terms of representation!

I was just happy that in text A I could use the word 'antithesis'! I'd learnt it this morning so it was nice to shove it in.

I finally used cataphoric referencing for the first time lol. I wish it was about technology.

Same here! Somebody predicted Twitter might come up and I had mindmaps made on potential things I could comment on, such as the graphology, the limited characters and then how usage of tweets and whether people still tried to write in full could represent them. Would've been nice, but oh well!

I thought Text A was lacking in "things" to keep it interesting, or even easy to analyse. The problem is that the examiners expect you to spend just five minutes each on the two texts for reading and annotating, even though we clearly need longer. Although to be fair, I wrote loads for Text B - talked about how the users, maintaining some degree of anonymity as a result of using a pseudonym, can post their opinions while being emotive and expressive without fear of real-world repercussions. That is why they can refer to children as "Biohazards", or generalise non-cyclists as having "excessive weight" - simulating the kind of discourse you would see in a closed-gate community, meaning it would be generally unfriendly to non-cyclists, people curious about cycling, or possibly other cyclists who might show disdain towards the pretentiousness of other cyclists.

Haha did you use it to reference the Olympics? Graphology was very boring, hardly anything to write about so I literally did it about the colours of the sites.

I commented on that anonymity under the idea of that the writer couldn't really express a negative opinion due to the potential of being accused of slander and what not, meanwhile the users in text B could have been as nasty and awful as they liked!