Writing — Composition and Effect

Write an article for a quality newspaper in which you argue either for or against the statement: 'Social media has made us more connected but less kind.' Demonstrate sophisticated control of form, audience and register.

Model response: The Kindness Illusion -- Twelve years into the social media experiment, we have more connections than any generation in human history. We have 800 Facebook friends, 2,000 Instagram followers, and precisely nobody to call when the car breaks down at midnight. The connectivity promised by Silicon Valley has been delivered. The kindness has not. Before I am accused of nostalgia -- that most comforting and least useful of emotions -- let me concede the obvious: social media has enabled genuine acts of solidarity. The #MeToo movement would not have happened without Twitter. GoFundMe has raised billions for people in crisis. These are real. But they are also, I would argue, exceptions that prove a structural rule. The architecture of social media rewards performance, not empathy. A 280-character takedown travels further than a carefully worded qualification. An angry reaction generates more engagement than a thoughtful one. We are not less kind because we are worse people; we are less kind because we are using tools that incentivise unkindness. Consider the analogy of a road. If you build a motorway, people will drive fast. Not because they are reckless, but because the road is designed for speed. Social media is a motorway for opinion: it is designed for velocity, not for care. The solution, if there is one, lies not in asking individuals to be nicer -- that is as effective as asking motorists to slow down without changing the speed limit -- but in redesigning the infrastructure. Until then, we will continue to be extraordinarily connected and remarkably alone.

Write a persuasive article arguing for or against the following proposition: 'We should ban smartphones for under-16s.' Your writing should demonstrate a sophisticated command of rhetorical technique.

Model response: Let me start with what I am not going to say. I am not going to tell you that smartphones are destroying a generation. I am not going to cite screen-time statistics as though correlation were causation, or invoke some golden age of childhood that never existed. The case for restricting smartphones for under-16s does not require moral panic. It requires only that we take seriously what we already know. We know that social media platforms are designed -- not accidentally, not as a side effect, but by teams of engineers whose explicit goal is user retention -- to exploit the dopamine reward system. We know that this system is still developing in adolescent brains. We know that rates of adolescent anxiety, self-harm and sleep disruption have risen in close parallel with smartphone adoption. And we know that the companies profiting from this adoption have, so far, chosen self-regulation over meaningful reform. None of this is controversial. The controversy begins only when we propose doing something about it. The objection I take most seriously is this: a ban is paternalistic. It removes agency from young people at precisely the age when they should be learning to make autonomous decisions. This is a strong argument, and I would not dismiss it. But it rests on a false premise -- the premise that a thirteen-year-old scrolling TikTok at 2am is exercising free choice. Choice requires information, alternatives, and the cognitive capacity to weigh long-term consequences against immediate gratification. Neuroscience is clear that this last capacity is not fully developed until the mid-twenties. We do not let fifteen-year-olds buy alcohol, drive cars or take out loans -- not because we do not trust them, but because we recognise that some decisions require a maturity that age alone can confer. A smartphone ban would not be a punishment. It would be a guardrail. And guardrails, as every parent of a toddler knows, are not the opposite of freedom. They are what makes freedom safe enough to practise.

Write a piece of descriptive writing suggested by this image: a single chair in an empty room, lit by a window. You may write about any subject related to this image.

Model response: The chair faces the window as though waiting for a conversation. It is wooden, straight-backed, the kind that does not invite you to stay -- the kind bought for function in an era that did not apologise for discomfort. Its seat is worn to a shallow curve by years of the same body, the same weight, the same afternoon arrangement: chair to window, window to garden, garden to the slow accumulation of seasons. The room offers nothing else. Bare walls, bare boards, and a quality of light that arrives already tired, as though it has passed through too many panes to carry warmth by the time it reaches the floor. This is not emptiness as absence. It is emptiness as choice -- the careful subtraction of everything that does not serve the view. Someone sat here and decided that the world beyond the glass was enough. The garden is visible in strips through the condensation: a hedge, mathematically straight; a square of lawn; a path that runs to the gate and stops. Nothing is overgrown. Nothing is accidental. Even the condensation follows a pattern, thickest at the base where warm air meets cold glass, thinning upward until the sky appears -- clear, pale, indifferent. I think of the body that shaped this seat. How they must have arrived each afternoon at the same hour, lowered themselves with the same controlled care, adjusted the same cushion that is no longer there. How the window must have held their reflection before the light changed and the reflection dissolved into the garden behind it, so that for a moment they were both inside and outside, both here and gone. The chair is still here. The body is not. But the room has not noticed the difference, or has decided not to mention it. The light arrives at the same angle. The seat holds its curve. And the window continues its long, one-sided conversation with whoever is willing to sit down and listen.

Write an opinion piece for a broadsheet newspaper arguing that public libraries are more important now than ever. Your writing should demonstrate mastery of form, audience and rhetorical technique.

Model response: In Defence of the Quiet Room -- The closure of a library never makes the front page. It is not dramatic enough. There is no fire, no flood, no scandal. Just a notice on a door, a stack of returned books, and a silence that used to be purposeful becoming a silence that is merely empty. Since 2010, over 800 public libraries have closed in the UK. The statistic is familiar. What is less familiar -- because it is harder to quantify -- is what disappears with them. A library is not a building full of books. If it were, we would not need them: the internet has more books than any library could hold, and most of them are free. What a library offers -- and what no digital platform has replicated -- is structured serendipity: the experience of looking for one thing and finding another, guided by proximity, by a librarian's recommendation, by the accident of what the previous borrower left on the return trolley. It is the teenager who came in for a graphic novel and left with a poetry collection. The retired man who came for the newspaper and stayed for the reading group. The mother who came for the baby rhyme-time session and found, in the twenty minutes of adult conversation that followed, the first moment of her week that was entirely her own. These are not quantifiable outcomes. They will never appear in a cost-benefit analysis. But they are the reason that communities fight for their libraries with a ferocity that surprises politicians, who tend to assume that anything free must be undervalued. The case for libraries is not nostalgic. It is urgent. In an information ecosystem designed to confirm what you already believe, a library is one of the last public spaces that organises knowledge by subject rather than by algorithm, that places unfamiliar ideas next to familiar ones without asking which you prefer. It does not track your reading habits, sell your data or recommend what you already like. It simply offers. And in that simplicity -- that radical, old-fashioned, increasingly rare simplicity -- lies something we cannot afford to lose.