Follow this framework to help writing your commentary.

Your commentary must analyse your own piece of writing and the choices you have made whilst writing it. You must explain how your style model has
influenced the decisions you made about how to use language in your own writing.

Introduction:

Explain where your idea came from, your chosen genre, your style model, where the finished piece might appear e.g. a column in a broadsheet newspaper, or
within a collection of short stories.

Define the purpose(s) of your piece and the target audience(s) as precisely as you can. Think about : age, gender, educational level, level of expertise.

Main body of analysis:

Explain the language choices which you made in order to achieve your purpose and appeal to your target audience. Be systematic in your approach. Give at
least three specific examples, quoting and analysing from your own work and making reference to your style model. Say why you made these choices and
explain the effects which you were aiming to create. Keep linking your analysis to contextual factors e.g. When you selected register did you consider the needs
of your target audience? How did the use of proper nouns help you to achieve your informative purpose? When you used a semantic field how did this help to
make the text more entertaining?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

 Discourse structure: e.g. beginning and ending, progression, cohesion devices etc.
 Lexis: e.g. emotive, persuasive, figurative, hyperbolic. What type of register did you want to create?
 Grammar: e.g. sentence types, sentence structures, use of pronouns, verbs, pre-modification.
 Semantics: e.g. connotations intended by the word choice, semantic field.
 Graphology: what graphological features did you use and how were you influenced by your style model?

Conclusion:

Briefly explain what development your writing went through during the drafting process. If you made changes, why were they needed? Link comments to
audience, purpose, genre conventions and style model as appropriate. Draw tentative conclusions about the effectiveness of your piece.
The best commentaries will:

 Analyse your creative piece in a systematic way

 Give the examiner a detailed insight into the writing process which you went through in order to create your piece
 Show consistently insightful awareness of purpose and audience
 Use accurate language and terminology
 Use short quotations from your text and your style models to illustrate points
 Analyse examples in detail
 Draw tentative conclusions about the effects which you achieved and the success of your piece
 Express ideas in a controlled and accurate way.

What does a commentary look like?

I have produced an interview aimed to inform and persuade for the Young Journalist of the Year competition which Tamezin magazine ran on the topic of ‘Unsung Heroes’. The
major problem initially was the dual, contrasting audiences. The first, Tamezin readers – young teenage girls – necessitated an informal register, straightforward lexis and few
complex sentences. The second – more important! – audience are the judges, who would expect a more formal register and discourse structure.
I have used a Radio Times interview with Morgan Freeman as my style model. The interspersion of long passages of quotation with narrative passages allowed me to satisfy both
audiences, as my grandfather’s reminiscences were colloquial, while the narrative passages, contextualizing many of the more context-bound elements of the quotation, could be
more sophisticated.

I have imitated the graphology of my style model: the contrast between the images of the older and younger Freeman was particularly striking. The only major departure from
my style model is the chronological order: in the RT article, events are organised by topic rather than by time. Wile this was also the case with the taped interview with my
grandfather, the transcribed first draft was confusing for my sample audience; I, therefore, rearranged it following a more standard narrative structure.

Continuing the ‘time’ theme, whenever my interviewee’s actions are mentioned, present tense is used (“he says, chewing”), often using minor sentences (“A chuckle”). This
allows him to be portrayed as a more active, human character whom readers will like (“chewing meditatively on a bagel”). The juxtaposition of the adverb “meditatively” with
eating a bagel also creates humour, making the subject an amusing and therefore sympathetic character; furthermore, the more human someone appears, the more heroic their
actions seem in contrast.

This necessity to show everything my grandfather did as courageous meant that I had to draw from the semantic field of admiration (“true courage”, “stood up for”) and many
adjectives and adverbs emphasising the difficulty of the circumstances or actions facing him (“large family”, “unacceptable by modern standards”).

The most challenging aspect was the discourse structure itself: I had to consider how to best convert the turn-taking, question-and-answer adjacency pairs of an interview into
what is essentially a continuous stream of dialogue. This was achieved using quotations in the passive voice, making the whole construction impersonal (“when asked why…”) or
asking the question in the voice of an assumed reader (and who won?”).

To create the appropriate register, I sued elision (“couldn’t”, “might’ve”); in general the narrative is intended to be of a slightly higher level of formality than the quotations.
While my grandfather does have a strong Cockney accent, I made the decision not to represent that in his dialect, to avoid alienating the reader. However, I have retained many
of the hedges (“well, when I get home…”, “there was no real clear-cut winner”) to convey the sense of a spoken voice.

I also tried to preserve the integrity of the quotations, mainly by the punctuation used: at points, I used dashes (-who…rooms”) and semi-colons (“14;
afterwards…”) to give the piece fluidity. In early drafts, if contextual information was required to explain a quotation, it was placed within square brackets
(“[The…$15]”), but this disrupted it so badly that explanations had to be integrated into the narrative.

Overall, I feel that readers will gain a good idea of my grandfather’s ‘unsung heroism’; however, the judges’ decision will be the final verdict.