How does the writer present the wind as part of everyday life in Villanueva? You should support your answer with close reference to the passage, including b...

What the question asks

This is the ten-mark AO2 task on Text One. It asks how the writer presents the wind as part of everyday life, so the subject of every sentence you write should be the writer and the verb should name a choice she has made. A summary of what the wind did in Villanueva, however accurate, answers a different question. The examiner is looking for named methods, well chosen short quotations, and a clear statement of the effect each method has on a reader.

How to build the answer

Work through the extract in order rather than hunting for scattered devices. The piece has a shape: the wind is domesticated in the opening, then made practical, then read as a set of signs, then met with organised routine, and finally redefined at the end. Tracking that shape lets you write about structure as well as language, which is what separates the upper levels from the middle ones. Keep quotations to a few words each and put the effect immediately after the quotation, in the same sentence where you can.

The material that earns credit

• Personification in the opening sentence. The wind is introduced not as weather but as "a member of the household", which makes it a resident rather than an event and sets up the whole extract. The claim that "It came off the plateau every afternoon and it did four things to our house without fail" adds regularity: the wind keeps to a timetable, like a family member.
• The father's extended joke. He calls the wind "the tenant, because it paid nothing and complained constantly", which reduces a force of nature to a bad lodger. The writer then notes that "That was the only joke he ever made about it", and that flatness is the point: the family refuses to dramatise what it lives with.
• Anaphora across four short sentences. "It rattled the shutters until my mother wedged them with folded cardboard", "It stripped the paint from the south door in long curls", "It pushed fine grey dust under that door" and the lifting of the roof iron all begin the same way. The repetition converts damage into routine, and the mother's cardboard shows the routine has an answer built into it.
• A domestic simile that turns destruction into timekeeping. The loose roof iron is "set it ticking like a clock". A clock is the least alarming object in a house, so the simile measures the wind rather than fearing it.
• A list of practical instructions. The father's advice covers "which way to park the truck", "how to hang the washing so that it did not tear" and "why the lemon tree had to be planted in the lee of the wall". Three ordinary decisions, all shaped by wind, show how far into daily life it reaches.
• Paradox in the treatment of good weather. The sky is "a hard, clean blue" that "that visitors photographed and residents distrusted", and the writer states flatly that "Nothing about that blue was generous", because "It meant the reservoir would drop again by August". The antithesis in a single clause separates the tourist from the resident and tells us that in Villanueva even fine weather is read for consequences.
• The metaphor of language. The rules for living there are "the grammar of the place, and I spoke it fluently", and are learned before reading. Adaptation is presented as a first language, held instinctively rather than endured consciously, which is reinforced by "A difficult climate is only miserable if nobody has taught it to you" and by the aphorism that "a hat is not a fashion but a roof".
• Precise sensory detail in the storm signs. The goats stand "in a tight knot", the light turns "the colour of weak tea", "the shadows lost their edges", the radio fills with a dry crackle and "the air smelled of wet stone before a single drop had fallen near us". Four senses in five sentences show how finely the town reads its own sky, and the claim that "every child in Villanueva could read them" makes that literacy communal.
• Compression in the account of the response. "the town folded itself away in ten minutes", and the clipped list "Washing off the line, animals in, shutters wedged" drops its verbs, so the syntax itself moves at the speed of the preparation.
• A strikingly calm simile for catastrophe. The school roof turns above the square "like a page in a book nobody was holding". The image is quiet, domestic and almost beautiful, which conveys how ordinary the event was; the point is completed by "everyone in Villanueva can fix a roof and nobody waits to be asked".
• Direct rejection of a word. The writer refuses the outsiders' term: "endurance, which is a grim word", because "Endurance suggests a person gritting their teeth until something stops" and "Nothing stopped in Villanueva". Redefining the vocabulary redefines the relationship.
• The closing simile of furniture. Life is arranged around the wind "the way you arrange furniture around a pillar you cannot move". Accommodation, not struggle, is the presented attitude.
• Deliberately flat sentences about her present life. "the weather is a subject for small talk rather than a subject for planning", and then the bare "Things stay on it." The emptiness of the sentence enacts the emptiness she describes, and prepares the admission that she "I found this restful, and then I found it slightly thin".
• Balanced repetition in the final sentence. "the weather asked something of us every single day" is answered by "every single day we answered it", and the echo turns a daily habit into identity, ending on the claim that this was "that daily answering was most of what we meant when we said we came from there".

What a weak answer does

A weak answer retells the extract: the wind damaged the house, the father made a joke, a roof blew off. It quotes long stretches without narrowing to the words that do the work, and it labels devices without saying what they achieve, so a sentence such as this is a simile stands alone with nothing after it. The most common ceiling on this question is treating the wind as the subject rather than the writing about the wind. A stronger answer keeps asking why she chose a clock, a tenant, a page, a pillar, and what each choice makes the reader feel about a family that lives with a wind every afternoon.

Level descriptors

• Level 1, 1-2 marks: a small number of undeveloped points about content, with little or no comment on the writer's methods, and quotation that is copied rather than used.
• Level 2, 3-4 marks: some relevant comment on what the writer does, with simple identification of language or structural features and only general explanation of their effect.
• Level 3, 5-6 marks: clear explanation of the writer's use of language and structure, supported by appropriately chosen short quotations that are linked to effect.
• Level 4, 7-8 marks: sustained analysis of how language and structure shape meaning, with well selected quotations and secure comment on the effect created for the reader.
• Level 5, 9-10 marks: perceptive analysis of the writer's craft across the whole extract, with precise quotation and evaluative comment on cumulative effect.