Reaching Merit and Excellence
Merit: three demands inside one word
- Merit asks for writing that is convincing: reasoned, clear and sustained. Those are three separate demands, and a piece can meet two.
- Reasoned — the ideas have grounds the reader can inspect, which is not the same as being argumentative. In a reflective piece an interpretation must be earned by the material: that summer changed how I see my father is asserted; showing the thing that changed and letting the reader arrive first is reasoned. The test: could a reader who disagreed state your grounds?
- Clear — the reader always knows who is speaking, when it is happening, and what is being claimed. Withholding is a technique; vagueness is not.
- Sustained — the quality holds across the whole piece. This is where Merit is lost: most pieces that miss it are reasoned and clear for two thirds of their length.
- Check the three separately, because a piece that fails Merit almost always fails on exactly one. Reflective writing usually loses it on reasoned, argument on sustained, fiction on clear.
Excellence: reading the criterion closely
- Excellence asks for writing that is effective: insightful selection and integration of ideas, language features, and structure to create a striking whole. The wording names four things and most students act on one.
- Insightful selection — what you left out as much as what you put in. Selection is a decision about omission.
- Integration — ideas, language and structure as one thing rather than three: an order that is the idea, and sentences that enact it. Two incompatible relationships to one place, written as alternating strands that never meet, argues structurally; short flat sentences in a piece about withheld feeling do the same.
- The removal test: take one element out, and if the piece is not worse, it was decoration.
- A striking whole is a claim about the entire piece, so a brilliant opening and a competent remainder does not qualify — the commonest Excellence near-miss.
Why "whole" changes the work
- Compare Level 2's Excellence, which asked for a distinctive personal voice — a property of manner, present from the first paragraph. A striking whole cannot be judged until the piece ends, and that difference explains why sustains matters so much more at Level 3.
- Excellence therefore cannot be secured in advance. You can plan a voice; you can only finish a whole. The consequence: the last third carries more of this grade than any other part, and has had the least attention.
What does not work, and what does
- Elevated vocabulary, because an unfamiliar word used at approximately its meaning makes the writing less precise while appearing more ambitious; longer sentences, because syntax is not thought; and a more dramatic subject, because a striking whole is made by treatment, not by topic.
- A striking opening, because an arresting first paragraph followed by an ordinary piece draws attention to the drop — and visible technique, whose symptom is symmetry.
- What does work is almost all subtraction and connection: decide in one sentence what the piece is about and cut everything that does not serve it; choose a meaningful structure before drafting; build on the gap between two viewpoints; write the last line early and aim at it.
- A device used twice in a selection is a habit, not a decision. Unconventional forms are legitimate only when the piece is otherwise controlled.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Take "The Auction" from the first page of this topic, now a solid Merit piece: five sections, a second viewpoint, reasoned and sustained writing throughout. Section 1 contains one detail that does not fit the grief — the auctioneer wore a tie.
Take it to Excellence.
Answer:
Step 1 — state what the piece is about in one sentence, and audit against it.
Two people used the words "the farm" to mean two different places, and only one of them lost anything.
Three passages do not serve it: a paragraph about cousins who never return, two sentences on the economics of sheep farming, and the final sentence explaining the meaning — I realise now that what I lost was my childhood. All three are cut, and the last matters most, because explaining an earned conclusion un-earns it.
Step 2 — make the structure carry the idea. Rebuild the five-part shape as alternation — my January, his January — so the two accounts sit adjacent and never resolve. Break the alternation once, at the end.
Step 3 — make the language enact it.
| Strand | Choice | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The writer's | Present tense, long sentences, weather and light | A holiday: time is spacious |
| The grandfather's | Past tense, short sentences, quantities | A job: time is measured because it is spent |
Step 4 — complete the opening at the close.
The image is unchanged; its meaning is reversed. The return does the arguing, and the sentence cut in step 1 is no longer wanted.
Step 5 — apply the removal test. Remove the tie and the first and last sections both collapse. Remove the January weather and nothing changes — decoration, cut.