Educerie · IB Diploma · English A: Language and Literature
Readers, writers and texts — analysing non-literary texts
Paper 1 gives you an unseen non-literary text and a guiding question. This is the method.
The 75 minutes
15 minutes reading and planning. 55 writing. 5 checking.
In those fifteen minutes, before anything else, answer four questions in the margin:
- What text type is this? Name it. Advertisement, opinion column, campaign poster.
- Who produced it? And what does the producer want?
- Who is the audience? Evidence: register, vocabulary, cultural references, assumed knowledge, where it would appear.
- What is it trying to do to that audience? Persuade, inform, sell, reassure, shame, mobilise.
Everything you write afterwards answers: how does this feature serve that purpose?
Reading audience from the text
You are rarely told who the audience is. You infer it, and saying how you inferred it is worth marks:
- Register — formal or colloquial, technical or plain. Technical vocabulary left unexplained assumes expertise; explained, it assumes none.
- Assumed knowledge — an unglossed reference to a person or event tells you the audience is expected to recognise it.
- Pronouns — "we" constructs a group and places the reader inside it. Watch who "we" includes and, more revealingly, who it excludes. "You" is direct address and creates obligation.
- Place of publication — a text's implied home tells you its readership.
Purpose is usually plural, and often in tension
The strongest analyses notice that texts do more than one thing at once, and that the purposes sometimes conflict.
A charity appeal must convey suffering vividly enough to move you and preserve the dignity of the people it depicts — and those pull against each other. A government health campaign must alarm enough to change behaviour without producing fatalism. A commercial advertisement adopting the visual language of public information borrows that genre's authority while pursuing a private end.
Naming the tension is a high-level analytical move. It moves you from describing what the text does to evaluating how well it manages a genuine difficulty.
Structure: organise by argument, not by feature
Do not write one paragraph on diction, one on imagery, one on layout. That is a features tour, and it caps criterion C.
Organise by claims about how the text works:
¶1 — The text establishes authority by borrowing the conventions of official information (evidence from typography, layout and register) ¶2 — It then converts that authority into personal obligation (evidence from the pronoun shift and the direct address) ¶3 — Its final move undercuts its own seriousness, which reveals the commercial purpose beneath (evidence from the closing image and the small print)
Each paragraph draws on whatever evidence serves it — verbal, visual, structural — rather than being confined to one category.
The rhetorical toolkit, used properly
Name the move, then say what it does here:
- Direct address — creates obligation and makes the reader a participant rather than an observer.
- Inclusive "we" — constructs a community and implies shared responsibility. Ask who is left out.
- Imperatives — assume the right to instruct, which itself claims authority.
- Rhetorical questions — appear to invite thought while foreclosing it; the answer is pre-supplied.
- Statistics — borrow the authority of science. Ask what is not given: a percentage without a base, a figure without a source, a comparison without a baseline.
- Anecdote — makes an abstraction concrete and individual, which is why campaigns lead with one named person rather than a number.
- Tricolon — three parallel items, which sounds complete and inevitable.
- Emotive lexis — but say which emotion and why that one. Fear, guilt, nostalgia and pride do different work.
- Modality — "may", "could", "will", "must". A shift from tentative to certain modality is where a text stops describing and starts demanding.
Analysing the visual
If the text has images, layout or typography, they are evidence and must be analysed.
Salience — what does your eye reach first, and how has the designer arranged that? Size, colour, contrast, position.
Reading path — the order in which the elements are encountered, and what that order argues.
Gaze — a figure looking directly out demands engagement; looking away invites the reader to observe rather than be addressed.
Framing and focus — a blurred background isolates its subject. A tight crop excludes context; ask what is being kept out of frame.
Colour — but be specific and cautious. "Red suggests danger" is thin; "the red is the same shade as the brand's logo, so the warning and the product are visually identified with each other" is analysis.
Word and image relations — do they reinforce, or does one undercut the other? Irony in multimodal texts usually lives in that gap.
What actually loses marks
- Not establishing purpose and audience before analysing features.
- A features tour — one paragraph per technique, no argument.
- Ignoring visual elements when the text is multimodal.
- Naming a device with no statement of effect.
- Asserting audience without evidence: say how you know.
- Treating a text's claims as true rather than as claims it makes.
- Ignoring the guiding question.
- Missing tone — especially irony, where a literal reading inverts the meaning.
- Analysing the topic rather than the text. A column about climate policy is not an invitation to write about climate policy.
Educerie · written from the published IB syllabus structure for Language A: Language and Literature, area of exploration "readers, writers and texts", amended guide, first assessment 2026. Original text. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.