GCSE English Language Writing

Types: Leaflet
Posted on May 14, 2018
This is Part 4 in a series about the five AQA GCSE English Language writing types. You can
find the other posts on letters, articles and speeches if you click on the links. Today it’s
number 4: the leaflet.
Unlike the other three, which will have largely different openings and endings, and largely
similar middles (with a few special tweaks), leaflets are kind of different all the way through.
They have some features of articles, and their content is largely based on what the purpose is,
but most students get a bit stuck when they get to leaflets.

Once again, they fall into the trap of what they look like rather than what they sound like, and
that means most students fall a bit short of the mark when it comes to whether or not you can
create an authentic, realistic piece of writing.
If you remember:
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With the 8 ‘bands’ of marking roughly equating to 4 levels (upper and lower) which are then
sorted into 9 grades. Seriously, you couldn’t make that up, could you? Only English teachers
could devise a situation like that.
Anyhow, if you’re aiming for a 5, think about 14 or 15, and if you’re aiming for Grade 7,
think about 18 or 19. If you want a Grade 9, think 22+. That means you’ve got to think about
‘convincing’ – not that you need to be convincing in your argument or explanation as such,
but that you need to present content for a leaflet that largely resembles what real leaflets look
and sound like.

Those are all rough estimates, because a lot depends on the paper, the complexity, the spread
of marks and about a dozen other factors that decide – once you’ve done the paper – whether
18 is a Grade 6, a 7 or an 8.

Back to leaflets…

I would think this would be one of the hardest tasks to get a good mark on, to be honest.
When was the last time you read an ‘assured and compelling’ leaflet?

If you did, I bet it was the pictures that captured your attention.

Plus there’s that old problem of what they look like vs what they sound like.
Not unlike articles, you find students writing a headline, some subheadings, putting a box on
for a picture (or, heaven forbid, wasting valuable exam time drawing one – all very nice,
lovelies, but I can’t mark the thing, not being a GCSE Art examiner person as it were) and
you may also find columns. Again, don’t bother with the columns. If columns and a box
where a picture is supposed to go are all you know about leaflets, well… it’s a very good job
you’re here!

So, what do AQA say leaflets might look and sound like?

At the bottom grades, you’re working on things like:

 the use of a simple title

 paragraphs or sections.

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And if you’re aiming for better?

 a clear/apt/original title
 organisational devices such as inventive
subheadings or boxes
 bullet points
 effectively/fluently sequenced paragraphs
So, I’m ruling out ‘sections’ or paragraphs (and their effective or fluent links) because
they’re given as guidance for all five of the writing types you may be asked to produce for
Paper 2 of your GCSE English Language. Not a feature of leaflets alone.

Titles or headlines may be similar to those you’d have on an article. You may also want to
use subheadings in both.

You MAY see boxes and bullet points then. Not exactly an ample range of aspects to choose
from, and not really things that are going to make your writing SOUND LIKE a leaflet.

There are, to be honest, a bountiful number of features in leaflets (as with articles) that relate
to presentation: colour, font, size, logos, italics, underlining, bold, capitalisation… I could go
on.

Most of these are the realms of a designer, not a writer. They are not things for you to do on
your GCSE paper: I don’t care if you’re trying to emulate the clarity and simplicity of a sans
serif font, or if you’re using colour (Don’t! Not under any circumstance!)

But if you were to underline words or go over them to make them bold, or use capitals, well,
I wouldn’t be averse to that.

What I care about most, though, is whether or not you can write like a leaflet writer.

And once you’ve removed the old columns-colours-and-pictures bit, where does that leave
you?

A headline?

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Some subheadings?

Surely then that’s also the same as an article?

No wonder it’s such a headache!

So, how do you write like a leaflet?

The main thing is that it is usually (and it depends on the task) 3rd person. It is the
anonymous third person throughout. Articles, letters and speeches usually have some ‘I’s in
there somewhere – it wouldn’t be inappropriate. And they may have the occasional writer
biography, which you know I am a fan of. A letter and a speech SHOULD have you giving a
little away about yourself. They are transactional. They invite transaction or reply, a
response. A leaflet is not always a transaction. It is often a closed bit of a thing that doesn’t
require a response. Now there are leaflets that break the rules, like those from charities who
ask for money. We’ll look a little at those.

This is why you so often find them paired up with informative writing, though. Doctors’
surgeries, hospitals, hairdressers, supermarkets, banks, waiting rooms, tourist information
offices … Wherever you are, you might find yourself some lovely informative leaflets,
telling you about heart disease or where you can go if you have a cough, information about
colouring products for your hair, information about diet or products, where to go if you want
to see historic buildings in your area…
They have a lot in common with websites, by the way, especially the static kind where the
information doesn’t change much. In fact, you could largely take the text off many websites
and put happily into a leaflet without much of a change.

But you do find persuasive ones too. Often they come through your letter box as junk mail.
They are a little different, and we’ll look at those too.

So the content and style is affected by the purpose for which you are writing, but those things
have less of an impact on organisation.

Let’s look at organisational aspects of both kinds of leaflet.

First, you have a screenshot of part of a leaflet from an old Edexcel GCSE source text from
the RNLI about beach safety
What you’ve got here is effectively the back and the front. So what can we see that you can
use to help you sound leaflet-like?

First, a simple CLEAR title.

You won’t have photos to depend on to attract the reader. Depending on the task and the
purpose, you could use an imperative:

KEEP YOUR CHILD SAFE TODAY

Or a statement about what they’ll find in the leaflet:

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BEACH SAFETY

But simple is best. BEACH SAFETY wouldn’t be the worst title in the world. ON THE
BEACH is clear and simple. Your heading should be too.

You’ve also got a summary strapline: “Your guide to a safe and fun time at the seaside”

That’s clear – and if your heading is cryptic, you’ll need a clear strapline. It’s simple. The
language is simple. It says exactly what it is. Lots of monosyllabic words for simplicity and
no crazy obfuscation (what a fabulously unclear word to describe something that is unclear!)

Two things, then, that you can do to start you off. You’ll notice that, unlike articles, there is
no waffly build-up. It is simple and clear. That’s because the purpose is to inform, advise and
maybe to persuade you a little.

To finish, there is a yellow call-out box (posh name for information/advice in a separate box
to make it stand out because it’s important) which is something you may wish to do too.
Boxes are on the AQA list of stuff for leaflets. It is also a “Call To Action”, which we’ve
seen can be an effective way to end an article or a speech. It’s speculative: “if you see… then
do this…”

And you can see, unlike a letter, it has the address at the bottom with all the other ways you
can get in touch.

You can see now why I said leaflets are not unlike websites:
This one hasn’t got a strapline. The heading is just ‘Bike’ (aids searchability on search
engines – which leaflets don’t have to care about) but there is a call-out box (or circle in this
case)

And guess what?

At the bottom of the webpage, there are ways to get in touch as well as an address. There’s
an imperative call to action: “Sign up for…” and a logo.

Not in any way different than the RNLI one.

So, that’s your “top and tail” – your opening and ending.

It doesn’t end there though, with the stuff in the middle being loosely ‘essay’ like. Nope.

Let’s look at the middle pages:

Subheading: “True Story” – so a lengthy anecdote then. On the right, there is another box
with a subheading, “RIPS”, and a diagram. The anecdote is simple enough. Again, you might
find something like that in an article. Notice how it’s got the third-person introduction,
“Carolynne Yard will never forget”, and then it goes into 1st person with the whole thing
framed in speech marks?

But the bullet points are a new thing. We may find them in an article. Not likely to find them
in a speech. Fairly unlikely to find them in a letter.
You’ve got a mix of speculative “if you…” points and imperatives, “Stay… Keep… Raise”
which goes with the general inform/advise purpose of the leaflet. Bullet points are good ways
to give a lot of information clearly and simply. Like the call-out box, it’s another thing
specifically mentioned by AQA as a feature of leaflets that you might want to use. You can
also see the bold too. Colons can be used to introduce a bullet point list, as you can see here.
You can also see the first introductory informative sentence.
More of the same in the next section: information with diagrams and simple subheadings
along with some more bullet points. Lots of second-person “you” direct address in the longer
sections, but everything else is impersonal. There is no sense of who is writing this. No
personality. No humour. Nothing that can be misunderstood. Leaflets are impersonal to the
extreme.
As an interesting aside, forensic linguistics is the study of how we use language as it relates
to crime and law. One of the things they do is look at idiosyncratic or personal styles of
punctuation, idea-organisation, spelling and writing to find the ‘fingerprints’ in our writing.
Whilst our personal style is useful in articles, letters and speeches, there shouldn’t be a single
whiff of it in a leaflet. If you’re a regular reader of these articles, you know I have my own
‘turn of phrase’, which, whilst not exactly unique, helps create my own
fingerprint. Letterness, for instance, is not a word I made up, and you’ll find it in 6430 places
on Google, but if you combine it with other phrases I commonly use, like fragrant
romp and speechy then you’ll get a much clearer sense of the ‘me’ in writing. Indeed, search
for letterness + “fragrant romp” and there is precisely one page listed on Google: mine.
Couple that with my preferences for semi-colons, hyphens and dashes and if I wrote a
ransom or kidnap letter, you’d be pretty likely to be able to work out that I was behind it.
As a further aside that is probably only interesting to me, this is how they work out if
Shakespeare is really the author of his plays and how they’d work out if a play turned up that
someone thought was really a lost work of Shakespeare.

A digression, I know.

Leaflets should not have any of these unique peculiarities, any of these personal peccadillos.
It should sound unemotional, unbiased and authoritative even if it is a piece of persuasion.
Nobody should be able to see YOU behind the curtains in the execution of a leaflet.
Let’s look a little closer at that impersonal style.

As you can see, from the beginning it sounds namelessly authoritative. “Swimming is one of
the best…” and you can see clearly there how impersonal it is. No I think or we believe. Just
cold hard assertion or assertion-as-fact.
It’s also got lots of second person direct address.

The paragraphs are fairly short – what I might call tabloid paragraphs. There is also a call to
action at the end of the section. Simple, clear vocabulary and simple, clear sentences. There
are few contractions, no it’ll but the dash instead of a colon on the second line, and
the you’re in the third paragraph, are slightly less formal and a little more chatty.
Whilst there may not be any personal tone or pronouns, there is often a big biography to help
add authenticity and validity to the leaflet. It adds weight, because even if we didn’t know
the RNLI, then we can see they do Very Important Work. It is one of the factors that makes
them sound genuine. In this section, you see the general first-person pronoun ‘we’. Other
leaflets may have that we outside this bit, but that depends. This is where you’ll find facts
and statistics, numbers, dates, wikipedia-type stuff. Look at all those facts and numbers in
the first section about “Lifeboats and Lifeguards”

The call-out on this page is very different, with much more development. Again, it explains
the mission of the group. It finishes with a call to action, “donate now” and what was
informative on the other pages has now become a direct attempt to persuade you to donate.

Most charities seem to have made a shift to information-sharing rather than out and out
appeals for money, so there are not so many examples of hard-core selling these days. I
found a lovely (short) piece from Macmillan which is very gentle encouragement to
volunteer
You can see a lot of the organisational features remain the same… heading, subheadings, the
bullet point list, the call-out box with a call to action, the call to action at the end with the
imperative verbs and speculative ‘If you need…’ with the usual multiple “couldn’t be easier”
methods of contact. In the headings and subheadings, you can see those questions (which are
then answered in the text), the imperative Make… the direct address, a colon introducing a
list.
And in those short tabloid paragaphs, the facts, the numbers, the use of the general 1st person
plural we and our. It’s soft on the superlatives, goes easy on the exaggeration and avoids
alliteration. Not a triple, tripartite or rule of three to be seen.
As a final note, I will say that although tabloid paragraphs are entirely appropriate and easy
to replicate, it’s one convention of articles and leaflets that I’d steer clear of. The reason is
that you are asked to develop your ideas. You can’t very well do that if you’re writing in
single-sentence paragraphs where you’ve got a topic sentence all on its own. When I mark
work, if I don’t know the student, I have no way of knowing that the student can develop
their paragraphs or not, and markers can’t just go around inferring that the writer can or
can’t. When there is no evidence of development, it makes a little hard to tick a mental box
to say the ideas are well developed.

Likewise with order. Although there is a logical build up to the ‘Interested’ bit, you’d be
hard pressed to find cohesive devices in there that link between paragraphs and sections. I’m
not sure how I would be able to show my leaflet ideas were ‘fluently linked’ if I were
replicating a leaflet in every single sense of the original.