Use every viewpoint, including a text's bias
The two texts carry different voices — a visitor's account, a resident's or owner's opinion piece. Full reading credit needs ideas from BOTH, not just the one easiest to summarise or that you agree with. A top-level move many candidates miss: check WHO wrote each text and WHY. A writer with an obvious stake — an owner defending their own development — gives you evidence to weigh the text's reliability, rather than claims to accept at face value.
Evaluate both texts, don't summarise each
The 15 Reading marks reward what you DO with both texts together, not how well you retell either one. A weak answer relays "Text A says... Text B says..." in turn; a strong one notices where the texts agree or clash, weighs how one-sided or convincing each claim is, and builds ONE argument from both. Test before writing: can you say in a single sentence how Text A's view and Text B's view relate — agree, disagree, or partly overlap?
Drawn from real examiner reports.
Using only one of the two texts
Because the texts usually give opposing voices — a tourist's account, a resident's letter — using only one cannot reach the full Reading marks. It happens when a candidate uses only the text they agree with, or misses that the second exists to challenge the first. Check: does my answer take content from BOTH texts, or does one dominate while the other is barely mentioned?
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): one-sided treatment — answering from only one stakeholder's viewpoint and ignoring the other perspective — is a recurring weakness.
Inventing a premise the texts never state
Building your argument on a claim the texts never actually make, then evaluating that invented premise, earns no reading credit — the argument is not anchored in the source material. A tempting but invented reason (that "events like this attract crime", when neither text mentions crime) must be replaced with a point the texts genuinely raise, such as noise or traffic.
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): inventing a premise absent from the texts and evaluating that instead is named as assertion, not argument.
Misreading or overgeneralising a detail
Imprecise reading caps the marks: overgeneralising a claim about one place into a whole country, or misattributing who benefits and who suffers. If Text B describes one street affected by noise, "the whole town has been ruined" misrepresents the evidence. Describe each point at the scale, and about the people, the text actually gives it.
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): misreading details — overgeneralising, misattributing who benefits or suffers — is named as capping the marks.
Close-paraphrase caps reading AND writing
Reworking the original sentences with only minor word swaps ("essential" to "vital") is close-paraphrase, not own-words evaluation. It caps Reading, because copying shows language transfer, not understanding, and Writing, because the response is not in your own voice or structure. Evaluation needs your own analytical sentences, not a relabelled retelling.
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): heavy close-paraphrase caps both the reading and the writing marks.
Contradicting the texts
Denying a problem the texts clearly establish, or arguing a position they give no evidence for, is assertion, not argument — it shows you have not used the material. Everything you claim should trace back to something a text actually says. If you cannot point to the evidence, leave the claim out; an opinion the texts contradict earns no reading credit.
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): asserting an opinion that contradicts the texts is recorded as assertion rather than argument.
Listing instead of evaluating
The clearest gap between top and weak responses is evaluation. A weak answer reads "Text A says... Text B says..." — accurate but passive, with no comment on how convincing either view is. A strong answer reads across both at once: weighing one claim against another, or noticing that one text ignores a problem the other raises. Judge and compare; do not just report.
Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1, all variants): evaluation — reconciling conflicting viewpoints across both texts — is the strongest reading discriminator, against responses that merely list or paraphrase each text.
Covering both texts is not evaluating them
A common belief is that the Reading marks reward COVERAGE — everything in Text A, then everything in Text B, as long as both appear. They do not. Two accurate summaries side by side, with no comparison or judgement, show comprehension but not evaluation. The test is never "have I mentioned both texts?" but "have I said how they relate, and how far I trust each?"
Grounded in Digest 2.1 (s23 Paper 2 Q1): weaker responses merely list or paraphrase each text, against evaluation as the strongest discriminator; also the w22 authorship point.
Read twice; note who wrote each text and why
Read both texts once for overall content and stance — for, against or mixed. Then note who wrote each and why: a visitor, resident, expert or owner? A stated interest tells you how much weight a claim deserves, and this check is often the route to the highest reading level.
Map agreements, clashes and gaps
On a second read, mark each point as fact, opinion or implicit attitude. For every significant idea, ask whether the other text agrees, disagrees, adds a missing angle, or stays silent. This map is what turns passive reading into the active comparison the Reading marks reward.
Select points you can evaluate, from both
When choosing material, pick points that let you compare, question or weigh, not only the ones easiest to restate. Take evidence from BOTH texts, and prefer a point where the two clash or where one writer has a stake worth questioning — those give you something to evaluate.
Weigh one claim against the other
Practise turning a listed pair into one weighed sentence: name Text A's claim, name what Text B raises against it, then judge. "Text A's promise of eased traffic overlooks the loss of the village green Text B describes" reads as evaluation, where two summaries would not.
This is Reading objective R3: select, evaluate and develop facts, ideas and opinions, as it applies to Paper 2 Section A, Question 1 — the directed-writing task built on TWO linked source texts. The question carries 40 marks in total: 15 for Reading (how well you select, evaluate and use ideas from BOTH texts) and 25 for Writing (form, register and structure — covered in topics 2.2 and 2.3). This topic is about the reading work that underpins the whole response: understanding both texts fully enough to evaluate them together, not just retell them.
What earns the 15 Reading marks on the Paper 2 directed-writing question — retelling both texts, or something more?
