Describing significance to New Zealanders
Significance is half the standard
- The standard names it separately: examine involves a coherent explanation and describing its significance to New Zealanders.
- It is where the grade ladder runs. Achieved describes the significance; Merit explains it; Excellence makes the whole submission convincing with comprehensive evidence.
- Give it its own section with its own heading. A significance paragraph tacked onto a conclusion is the commonest way this half of the standard goes missing.
- It needs evidence like everything else. A significance claim with no evidence is an opinion about importance.
The five measures, and how to use them
- Importance to people at the time — did contemporaries treat it as mattering? Evidence: what they did about it. Money raised, meetings held, column inches, decisions taken.
- Depth of impact — how much did affected lives change? Evidence: specific changes to specific people or groups.
- Number of lives affected — how many, and at what distance. Evidence: a figure, or an honest statement that no count exists.
- Duration — how long the effects lasted. Evidence: dated endpoints.
- Ongoing effects — what is still traceable. Evidence: something that exists now and can be pointed at.
- You do not need all five. Say which your topic satisfies and which it does not. A section claiming all five is less convincing than one claiming three and conceding two, because the concession shows the measures were applied rather than recited.
"To New Zealanders" — three permitted relationships
- An event within New Zealand. The simplest case.
- An international event New Zealanders took part in. The significance travels with the people.
- An international event that influenced New Zealand. The significance travels through a channel — trade, policy, ideas, migration — and the channel has to be evidenced, not assumed.
- Location in New Zealand is not required. The standard says so explicitly.
- State which relationship you are claiming. It takes a clause and it tells the marker what kind of evidence to expect.
Making a local topic significant to New Zealanders
- Most school topics are local, and local significance is real but has to be connected upward.
- Three forms the connection can take:
- The local instance of a national pattern. This is one of hundreds of district memorials raised in the 1930s, and it shows in detail what the national pattern looks like at ground level. The smallness becomes the advantage.
- The local effect of a national event. A national decision landing in one place, where its operation can actually be traced.
- The local origin of something wider. Rarer, and strong when available.
- Write the connection as a sentence. This memorial matters beyond the district because... Leaving it implied is how the section reads as local pride rather than as an argument.
- Test it: would a reader from another part of the country accept the claim? If it only works for someone from your district, the connection has not been made.
Describing versus explaining significance
- Describing says what the significance was: it affected this many people, this deeply, for this long.
- Explaining says why those effects amount to significance, and why this event rather than a comparable one.
- The move from one to the other is usually a comparison. Against what did not happen, against a similar case that did not have these effects, or against what the situation was before.
- A second move is to say what it was not significant for. Precision about scope makes the rest credible, and it is the same discipline as naming a continuity.
- A third is to say for whom. Significance is rarely uniform: an event can matter enormously to one group and little to another, and saying so is explanation rather than description.
Worked Example
Worked example
Two significance sections for the Mangaroa Bridge memorial (invented, written for these pages).
Version A
Version B — rewrite it.
Answer:
Step 1 — diagnose A. It asserts significance three times and evidences it none. Every sentence would be true of any memorial anywhere, which is the definitive test for a description of a category rather than of a topic.
Step 2 — apply the five measures, with evidence, and concede where the topic is weak.
Step 3 — evidence importance at the time by what people did, not by what they felt.
Step 4 — make the connection upward, explicitly.
Step 5 — say for whom, and what it was not significant for.
Version B applies the five measures with evidence, concedes the one where the topic is weak, evidences importance by behaviour rather than by adjectives, states the connection to the national pattern as a sentence, and says both for whom it was significant and what it was not significant for.