AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 2 — Writers' Viewpoints and Perspectives (8700)

This guide covers Paper 2: Writers’ Viewpoints and Perspectives, the second of two examined components in AQA GCSE English Language (8700), for first teaching 2015. It complements the site’s existing Paper 1 study guide, Paper 1 revision notes, Paper 1 practice questions and Paper 2 practice questions by covering the paper those resources do not: where Paper 1 (Explorations in Creative Reading and Writing) works with fiction and narrative description, Paper 2 works entirely with non-fiction, comparing how different writers present their own viewpoint on a shared topic.

Syllabus coverage

AQA GCSE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (8700) – PAPER 2 WRITERS’ VIEWPOINTS AND PERSPECTIVES

• Section A: Reading – two unseen non-fiction or literary non-fiction extracts on a related theme, drawn from the 19th century plus either the 20th or 21st century, depending on the exam series. Genres include high-quality journalism, articles, reports, essays, travel writing, accounts, sketches, letters, diaries, autobiography and biographical writing. Questions require students to identify and interpret information and ideas, explain writers’ use of language and structure to achieve effects, and compare the writers’ different perspectives across the two texts. Section A is worth 40 of the paper’s 80 marks.
• Section B: Writing – a single writing task related to the theme of the Section A sources, requiring students to produce a piece of writing (for example, an article, a letter, or a speech) that presents their own viewpoint or perspective on the topic, using appropriate form, tone and rhetorical technique. Section B is also worth 40 marks.

The paper lasts 1 hour 45 minutes and, together with Paper 1, forms the full external assessment for GCSE English Language; a separate, non-exam-assessed Spoken Language endorsement is reported but carries 0% weighting toward the overall grade.

Why two texts, and why one from the 19th century

Unlike Paper 1’s single fictional extract, Paper 2 is built entirely around comparison. The specification requires all texts to be “high-quality, challenging” and to represent “a substantial piece of writing,” making genuine demands in content, structure and language – transient material such as instant news feeds is explicitly excluded. Pairing a 19th-century source with a modern one is a deliberate design choice: it forces students to read across historical distance, noticing how tone, assumed audience and rhetorical convention differ between, say, a Victorian travel account and a 21st-century opinion piece on the same broad theme, rather than simply comparing two contemporary writers whose styles are more likely to overlap.

What “comparing perspectives” actually means

The specification’s own aims are precise: students should “read and evaluate texts critically and make comparisons between texts,” and “summarise and synthesise information or ideas from texts.” In practice, this means a strong Section A answer does not describe each text’s viewpoint separately and then note a difference at the end – it identifies specific, comparable points (attitude to the same event, choice of emotive language, use of a particular structural device) and discusses how each writer’s choices serve their distinct purpose or audience, throughout the answer rather than as an afterthought.

Section B: writing to a specified viewpoint

Section B does not ask students to write neutrally – it requires presenting a viewpoint, clearly and persuasively, on the theme set by Section A. This means the writing skills tested here (rhetorical questions, direct address, structured argument, a deliberately chosen tone) are different in kind from Paper 1’s narrative and descriptive skills, even though both are assessed against similar technical accuracy criteria (Standard English, accurate grammar, punctuation and spelling, and a wide vocabulary). Students who default to a Paper 1-style narrative opening in a Paper 2 writing task – telling a story rather than making and developing an argument – consistently underperform relative to their technical accuracy, because the task demands a different genre of writing altogether.

Common mistakes

• Summarising each Section A text separately instead of comparing them directly, especially failing to address how the two writers’ methods differ, not just what each one says.
• Ignoring the historical gap between the two texts. A 19th-century extract will use period-appropriate vocabulary, sentence structure and assumptions that a modern reader may misread as simply “old fashioned” rather than as a deliberate stylistic and historical feature worth analysing.
• Writing a narrative in Section B when the task calls for viewpoint-driven, persuasive or discursive writing – the two require genuinely different structures and techniques.
• Treating Section A and Section B as unconnected halves of the paper, when the specification deliberately links them: Section B’s writing task shares its theme with Section A’s reading sources, and strong candidates let ideas encountered while reading inform the content of their own writing.
• Under-using structural analysis in Section A, focusing only on individual word choices (language) while neglecting how a writer orders and structures information across the whole extract to build their argument.

How to approach it

Practise reading two thematically linked non-fiction extracts side by side and drafting comparison points before writing a full answer, since the comparative skill – not comprehension of either text alone – is what Section A is built to test. Read genuinely across the 19th-century/modern divide during revision, using real extracts from each period, so that period-specific vocabulary and tone become familiar rather than a source of anxiety in the exam itself. For Section B, practise writing to a stated viewpoint under timed conditions, deliberately avoiding narrative structure, and check draft responses against the technical-accuracy criteria (Standard English, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary) that apply equally to both papers. Finally, since Section A and B share a theme, use planning time to let ideas and vocabulary from the reading sources inform the writing task, rather than treating the two sections as entirely separate 45-minute exercises.

Official syllabus

AQA, GCSE English Language (8700) Specification, Section 3, Subject Content, and specification-at-a-glance, https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-8700/specification/subject-content and https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-8700/specification/specification-at-a-glance, fetched and verified in full 2026-09-02.