Writing About Society

Select a course.

arrow_back

infoWhy this? Writing About Society develops critical literacy by examining how non-fiction writers select, frame, and evaluate real people, events, and social conditions. Through historically grounded texts, pupils learn to distinguish fact from opinion, infer viewpoint, compare presentations, summarise ideas, and make supported judgements about culture, morality, inequality, and public life.

scheduleWhy now? As a later Year 9 unit, it draws together rhetorical analysis, contextual interpretation, and the comparative skills developed across the course, particularly in persuasion, diverse voices, political literature, and poetry. Moving from literary texts to public discourse enables pupils to apply these habits to real-world viewpoints and communicate increasingly informed judgements of their own.

Fiction is writing that is invented or imagined, while non-fiction is writing based on facts, opinions, real events, or real experiences.
Examples of non-fiction include journalism, autobiography, biography, memoir, travel writing, and guides.
Society means the people, relationships, institutions, and rules that organise a community or country.
Culture means the shared beliefs, values, customs, arts, and ways of life of a group of people.
Morality means ideas about what is right and wrong behaviour.
A summary is a brief account of the most important ideas in a text or topic, written in the reader's own words.
An evaluation is a supported judgement about the effectiveness, value, or success of something.
Non-fiction writers communicate viewpoints, and their language choices can reveal attitudes, feelings, and judgements.
Contextual knowledge helps readers interpret non-fiction because texts are shaped by the time, place, society, and culture in which they were written.
The Victorian era lasted from 1837 to 1901.
Victorian Britain was shaped by major social, political, and economic change, including industrialisation, urbanisation, debates about slavery, war, science, and women's rights.
The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain from a mainly rural country into an industrial country, leading to rapid urbanisation, overcrowding, inequality, and dangerous working conditions.
Queen Victoria was associated by many people with stability, duty, and strict moral values, so her death symbolised the end of the Victorian age.
Crime is behaviour that breaks the law, while morality is concerned with whether behaviour is considered right or wrong by society or individuals.
Public disorder can be framed differently through words such as protest, disturbance, disorder, riot, and massacre, and each word guides the reader's judgement.
The Peterloo Massacre took place in 1819 at St Peter's Field in Manchester, when a large crowd campaigning for political reform was attacked by cavalry.
Peterloo occurred in 1819 during the Regency period and was not a Victorian event.
A writer can frame an event by selecting particular details, using loaded language, and choosing a tone that encourages sympathy, blame, fear, or judgement.
Source A presents the crowd at St Peter's Field as peaceful, respectable, unarmed, and civic-minded, while presenting the attack as sudden, brutal, and unjust.
Source B presents modern rioters negatively through language linked to violence, greed, and fear, creating a condemnatory tone.
Victorian poverty was caused and worsened by factors including overcrowding, low wages, insecure work, illness, and limited support for the poor.

rocket_launchYou must be able to

Identify whether a text is fiction or non-fiction by checking whether it presents invented events or facts, opinions, real events, and experiences.
Use key terms such as society, culture, morality, summary, and evaluation accurately in spoken and written responses.
Summarise a text or historical period by selecting the most important ideas, omitting minor details, and rewriting the information in your own words.
Evaluate a text by making a clear judgement about its effectiveness or value and supporting that judgement with relevant evidence.
Infer a writer’s viewpoint by selecting short quotations and explaining how specific words, images, or details reveal attitudes and feelings.
Analyse language methods such as simile, imagery, contrast, tricolon, rhetorical question, humour, direct address, repetition, hyperbole, statistics, and emotive language by explaining their effect on the reader.
Compare two non-fiction texts by explaining similarities and differences in viewpoint, tone, methods, and presentation of people or events.
Distinguish between fact, opinion, statistics, triples, and emotive language in a non-fiction text and explain how these features shape the reader’s response.
Write a diary entry in role using first person perspective, reflection, and accurate contextual details about workhouse life and conditions.
Structure a comparative response with an introduction, comparative paragraphs, and a conclusion, using evidence from both texts.

Curriculum Portal