Example 1 — Establishing purpose and audience first

A weak opening:

This poster uses a dark photograph and capital letters to make the reader feel scared about their children being online.

A strong opening:

Text A presents itself as a public information campaign — the plain serif, the restrained palette, the imperative advice — but the smallest type on the poster reveals a commercial producer, a broadband company selling a £4 monthly subscription. The text is therefore doing two things at once, and the relationship between them is the most revealing thing about it: it borrows the visual and rhetorical authority of a public health warning to sell a product, and its design works to keep those two purposes from being noticed together. The audience is constructed as a parent of a school-age child, addressed as someone already doing the right thing — "he is safe" — and then shown that they are wrong.

What the second version does. It names the text type, notices the gap between apparent and actual producer, and states a thesis about how the two purposes relate. Everything the essay does afterwards is evidence for that claim.

The commercial line at the bottom is the single most important detail on the poster, and a candidate who does not mention it cannot reach the top bands — they have analysed a public information campaign that does not exist.

Example 2 — Analysing the visual, precisely

The photograph withholds its subject. We are shown a child's bedroom with no child in it, and the poster's caption insists on a presence — "he is upstairs" — that the image refuses to confirm. The only light comes from the phone, which illuminates the ceiling but not the bed: the device is lit and the child is not, so the viewer's eye finds the technology exactly where it expects to find the person. The soft focus at the edges narrows attention to that glow and produces the visual grammar of surveillance footage rather than of family photography.

The reading path completes the argument. The eye moves from the reassurance at the top, set small and in a quiet serif, to the large white sans-serif contradiction at the centre — and the typography enacts the reversal, with the comforting claim rendered visually weak and its refutation rendered inescapable.

Note that "dark colours suggest fear" appears nowhere. Each observation is specific to this image — what the light falls on, what is absent, what the focus does — and each is connected to an effect on the viewer. The typographic point is the strongest, because it reads design as argument: the poster does not merely say the parent is wrong, it makes the reassurance look small.

Example 3 — Reading the rhetoric against the purpose

The poster's rhetoric is built on a withheld referent. "You don't know who else is in there" never names the danger, and the omission is doing the work: an unnamed threat is unfalsifiable and expands to fit whatever the reader most fears. The second-person address makes this personal — the sentence is about your ignorance, not about risk in general — and the present tense makes it current rather than hypothetical.

The advice that follows then performs a striking reversal of register. Having produced alarm, the poster immediately minimises the remedy: "It is not a difficult conversation. It is a short one." The two short declaratives, parallel in construction, are calming where the headline was alarming. Read charitably, this is responsible campaign design, since alarm without an achievable action produces paralysis rather than behaviour change.

Read against the small print, it is doing something else. The reassurance makes the reader receptive at precisely the moment the commercial offer appears, and the £4 subscription is positioned as the second, effortless half of the "short conversation". The text's two purposes — to warn and to sell — are not in tension at all; the warning has been engineered to make the sale feel like safeguarding.

This is what evaluation looks like in this course. The paragraph offers a charitable reading and then a sceptical one, and reaches a judgement about which the evidence supports. It analyses the text as a designed object with interests, which is exactly what Language and Literature asks for and what a purely device-hunting answer never achieves.

Example 4 — The same text, handled badly

The poster uses a rhetorical question and emotive language to persuade parents. The colours are dark which creates a scary mood. The capital letters make the important words stand out. The writer uses short sentences at the end which makes it easy to read. Overall the poster is effective at persuading its audience.

Five failures.

There is no rhetorical question in the text — a device asserted because it was expected rather than observed, which damages criterion A as well as B.

"Dark colours create a scary mood" is generic enough to fit any poster ever made.

"Capital letters make words stand out" describes typography without analysing it — which words, and what does the contrast with the small serif above them argue?

The commercial purpose is never noticed, so the analysis is of a text that is not there.

And "overall the poster is effective" is a verdict with no criterion: effective at what, and on whom?

Educerie · original worked examples written against the published IB syllabus structure for Language A: Language and Literature, amended guide, first assessment 2026. Text A and the company named in it are entirely invented for this material. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.