'We should let coastlines change rather than defend them.' Discuss.

This is a Section B discursive task worth 40 marks, assessed on content and organisation together with vocabulary, sentence structure and technical accuracy (W1 to W4). It is a writing question, not a geography question. Specialist knowledge of coastal management is not required and is not credited on its own, though a well-chosen example is one way of showing controlled, purposeful content.

What the task demands

'Discuss' requires the proposition to be genuinely tested, not merely opposed. The claim has two halves that must both be handled: letting coastlines change, and defending them. An essay that argues only against sea walls has answered half the title.

Reaching Band 5 (33 to 40)

1. Take a position, then complicate it. The top band asks for sustained and engaging writing. A thesis that admits a real cost on its own side reads as thought; a thesis that meets no resistance reads as assertion.
2. Organise by argument, not by side. Three sections each weighing one issue, for instance who bears the cost, what defence does to the coast further along, and what is owed to people already living there, outperforms a block of points for followed by a block against.
3. Keep the register consistent and formal. Discursive writing rewards precise connectives ('the difficulty with this', 'granted that', 'the consequence is'). Rhetorical questions and direct appeals to the reader tend to break the register the band descriptor requires.
4. Use one developed example rather than four brief ones. A single situation followed through, a village where defending one stretch starved the beach next to it, demonstrates reasoning. A list of place names demonstrates recall.
5. Vary sentence length deliberately. A short declarative sentence at the end of a paragraph is the most reliable way to make a discursive point land.

What holds a piece in Band 3 (17 to 24)

Three patterns dominate. The first is the balanced essay with no view, which lists both sides and concludes that there are advantages and disadvantages. The second is repetitive structure, where every paragraph opens 'Another reason is', which caps sentence variety however good the ideas are. The third is unsupported scale, claims about millions of homes or entire countries disappearing, which weakens rather than strengthens an argument because the reader stops trusting it.

Technical accuracy

Watch paragraph boundaries. Discursive writing commonly loses organisation marks when two distinct arguments share a paragraph. One idea, one paragraph, with a first sentence that states the idea.