Free writing: Wise Use of Technology article

Task 1 — model paragraph (use every note).

In March, a survey of 600 pupils at our school found an average of seven hours of screen time a day. One pupil in three slept less than six hours; the causes included night notifications and online games after midnight. On 14 April, the school organised “Digital Balance Day”, with phones left in lockers and workshops on safe internet use.

Task 1 — what is credited. The printed criteria of this task type are « Appropriate use of the prompts » and « Language »: a paragraph that keeps only two cells of the table does not fully use the prompts, even with accurate English. Each cell must appear: the survey (600 pupils, our school, March), the two findings, the two causes, and the four elements of the action. Do not add invented statistics, and keep to four lines.

Task 2 — model reply (about twelve lines, three pieces of advice).

Dear reader,

Your problem is more common than you think, and technology is not your enemy — the way your devices are set up is. First, decide when your phone may speak to you: turn off every notification except calls while you revise, and check your messages once an hour. Your machine should wait for you, not the opposite. Second, give your revision a visible shape: work for twenty-five minutes with the phone in another room, then allow yourself five minutes online. You will be surprised how much you finish before midnight. Third, do not sleep next to your screen. Buy a cheap alarm clock, leave the phone to charge in the kitchen, so that messages do not interrupt your rest. The internet is an excellent servant and a terrible master. Try these three rules for two weeks, then judge the result yourself.

The columnist

Task 2 — what is credited. The printed criteria of this task type are « Adherence to task and content adequacy », language accuracy and « Mechanics of writing ». Adherence here means: the genre is a reply letter (opening, closing, second person), the reader's own facts are answered (notifications, midnight revision, phone beside the pillow), and there are three distinct pieces of advice, not one repeated three times. Mechanics: capital letters on First, Second, Third, a comma after the salutation, no sentence without a full stop, and the spelling of technology, notifications, advice (noun, never advices).

Model contribution (about twelve lines).

Machines at Work: Threat or Relief? — Supporters of the motion have a point: robots already weld cars, sort parcels and read medical scans faster and more safely than people, and a society freed from dangerous or repetitive work could give its citizens more time for education and family. Opponents answer that technology does not share its profits: when a factory replaces fifty workers with three machines, the fifty do not become engineers overnight, and whole towns can lose their purpose. In my opinion the motion is only half true. Intelligent machines will certainly take over most routine jobs, and I welcome that; but it will be “a good thing” only if governments and companies retrain the workers whose jobs disappear and tax the machines that replace them. The invention is not the problem — the way we share what it produces is.

What is credited — adherence to task and content adequacy. Idea: the consigne names four obligations, and the corrector ticks them one by one: a title; one argument for; one argument against; a position that is justified, not merely stated. A contribution that only attacks robots, or that gives an opinion without the two sides, does not fulfil the task even in good English. The genre is a reasoned contribution for a debate page: no “Dear reader”, no list of rules, no letter closing.

Language. Contrast markers carry the structure — Supporters of the motion… / Opponents answer… / In my opinion… — and make the two sides visible before the position. Use the future for predictions (will take over) and the present simple for facts (robots already weld); keep machine / robot / invention / technology as the working vocabulary.

Mechanics. Capital letters on the title words and on I, a full stop after every sentence, and the spelling of technology, intelligent, government, replace.

Typical losses. A position that contradicts the argument for the writer has just given; twenty lines instead of twelve; a last sentence that only repeats the motion; a contribution written as an e-mail to a friend.