Discursive writing

Few questions in education are argued more fiercely, or more reasonably, than the one that surfaces in every staffroom and every kitchen at six o'clock: should secondary schools set homework at all? It is tempting to treat this as a simple clash between weary students and demanding teachers. In truth, thoughtful people land on both sides for serious reasons, and the question turns on something easily overlooked — not whether homework is pleasant, but whether it actually does what it claims to do.

The case for abolition begins with evidence that is harder to dismiss than its opponents admit. The link between homework and achievement in the lower secondary years is, at best, weak; for younger pupils it is close to nonexistent. Set against that thin benefit sits a real cost: hours of family time surrendered, sleep eroded, and — most troublingly — an advantage handed to children with quiet rooms and educated parents over those with neither. If homework widens the very gaps schools exist to close, abolishing it is not indulgence but fairness.

And yet the case against abolition deserves to be met at its strongest, not waved away. Homework, done well, teaches something a classroom cannot: how to work alone, manage time and persist without a teacher at one's shoulder — habits that matter long after the syllabus is forgotten. For the older student facing public examinations, independent practice is not optional busywork but the rehearsal on which performance depends. The defenders of homework are not nostalgists; they are pointing to a genuine good that abolition would discard.

So the disagreement is real, and it is not yet obvious that either side simply wins.

Title: 'Discuss whether space exploration is a justifiable use of public money.'

Mode check: 'Discuss whether' = discursive, not argumentative. Required: balanced dialectic, qualified conclusion, measured register.

Arrangement chosen — POINT-BY-POINT (ping-pong). The question splits cleanly into sub-issues (cost, spin-off benefit, inspiration/long-term survival), and the two sides speak most powerfully when set against each other on each. Block would let each side build, but here the weighing is clearer issue by issue.

Introduction (frame the tension): open on the genuine difficulty — the same launch can look like either a betrayal of the hungry or an investment in everyone's future. Define 'justifiable' as a question of opportunity cost, not affordability. Preview the route.

Body — sequenced sub-issues, each weighing BOTH sides:

1. Opportunity cost. For abolition: every space dollar is a dollar not spent on hospitals or schools. Against: space budgets are a tiny fraction of public spending; cutting them would fund little for long.
2. Spin-off benefit. For: GPS, weather forecasting, medical imaging and materials all trace back to space programmes. Against: such benefits are unpredictable and could arguably be funded directly.
3. Inspiration and long-term survival. For: exploration drives science education and addresses planetary-scale risk. Against: speculative, distant, and a luxury when present needs press.

Synthesis (qualified, re-framing): the question is mis-framed as 'space OR welfare'. The real variables are SCALE (proportionate, not blank-cheque, funding) and PURPOSE (Earth-facing science vs prestige projects). Justifiable, then, but conditionally — a position the body's weighing has earned.

Register reminder: measured, hedged, respectful of both sides; no ranting about either 'wasteful billionaires' or 'science-haters'.

There is a photograph, taken after almost any great final, that seems to settle the question instantly: thousands of strangers, arms around shoulders they have never touched before, singing as one. Competitive sport, the image insists, unites. And yet a few miles away, on the same evening, other strangers are being separated by police for the same reason. Both pictures are true, and the difficulty of the question lies precisely there — competitive sport does not simply unite OR divide; it does both, intensely, and often at once. What is worth asking is when, and why, it tips one way rather than the other.

Begin with the case for unity, which is more than sentimental. Sport offers something a fractured society rarely finds: a shared focus that cuts across class, language and politics. A national team can, for ninety minutes, make a country feel like one thing rather than many. Local clubs stitch generations of a town together; the playground game gives children a common language before they share any other. At its best, sport builds what sociologists call social capital — the loose, trusting connections between people who would otherwise never meet. This is not nostalgia. It is visible in any park on a Saturday morning, where strangers organise themselves, cooperatively and good-humouredly, around a set of agreed rules.

Against this, however, stands an objection that honesty will not let us minimise: competition is, by definition, the manufacture of opposing sides. The same loyalty that bonds a crowd to its team defines, in the same breath, the rival it must defeat. Tribal identity is sport's fuel, and tribal identity has a darker register — the chant that curdles into abuse, the rivalry that hardens into violence, the national pride that shades into something uglier. History supplies the extreme cases, where a match became the spark for real conflict; everyday life supplies the milder ones, the family fallings-out and the bigotry that hides, half-respectable, behind a team colour. To pretend sport only unites is to ignore the ledger's other column.

The temptation now is to declare a draw — unity here, division there, call it even. But that abdicates the actual question, which is about WHEN sport unites and when it divides. And once we ask that, a pattern emerges. Sport seems to unite most when the shared activity is foregrounded and the opponent is incidental — the park game, the club that takes anyone, the team a whole community simply enjoys. It divides most when winning over a defined enemy becomes the point, when identity is invested in defeating rather than in playing. The variable, in other words, is not sport itself but what we ask it to carry: a vehicle for belonging, or a vehicle for opposition.

So the question, properly understood, is not whether competitive sport unites or divides, but how we choose to hold it. The same final that produced the singing crowd and the policed one differed not in the sport but in what the supporters brought to it. If that is right, then the answer is genuinely conditional: competitive sport does more to unite than to divide WHERE the playing matters more than the beating — and more to divide where the reverse is true. The hopeful conclusion is that this is, at least partly, within our control. We cannot abolish competition without abolishing sport, but we can decide whether the rival across the line is an enemy to be humiliated or simply the necessary other half of a good game.

My controlling structural decision was to keep the essay genuinely discursive rather than let it slide into argument, so I built it on a clear dialectical spine — thesis (unity), antithesis (division), synthesis (the re-framing) — and made each phase audible through signposting.

I chose a BLOCK arrangement rather than point-by-point because the two positions in this question are whole emotional stances, not a set of separable sub-issues: the crowd that sings and the crowd that fights are felt as totalities, and I wanted each to build cumulative force before the turn. To stop the reader losing the thesis across the long antithesis, I opened the antithesis with an explicit adversative pivot ('Against this, however, stands an objection…') and bracketed both sides with the framing photograph, which I planted in the introduction and recalled in the conclusion so the whole essay would feel designed rather than episodic.

Sequencing was deliberate: I led with unity because it is the more familiar, feel-good view, then let the antithesis COMPLICATE it, which lets the essay deepen rather than merely alternate. I tried to keep the weighting fair — giving division comparable depth and refusing to strawman it ('honesty will not let us minimise') — because an under-weighted antithesis would have made the synthesis look pre-decided.

The conclusion was the choice I worked hardest. I was conscious of the two failure modes — fence-sitting and disguised argument — and tried to avoid both by re-framing the question around a hidden variable ('what we ask sport to carry') so that my answer could be genuinely conditional ('unites… WHERE the playing matters more than the beating'). I signalled the re-frame explicitly ('the question, properly understood, is not whether… but how') so the examiner could see the synthesis doing intellectual work rather than restating the body.

If I revised, I would add one concrete example to the antithesis to match the specificity of the unity section, since on rereading the division case leans slightly more on assertion than the thesis does — a small imbalance in evidence, if not in care.

Every city is an argument with itself about time. Walk any old street where a glass tower has risen between two stone facades, and you are looking at a question made physical: should a society keep what it has built, or clear the ground for what it might build next? The view to be explored here — that preservation should take priority over replacement — has an immediate, almost moral appeal. But the appeal is worth slowing down, because the case for keeping the old and the case for making way for the new are not really opposites. They are two answers to a question the slogan conceals: what, exactly, is a building FOR?

Take the preservationist view first, and at its strongest. An old building is not merely shelter; it is memory made solid. It carries the proof that people lived here before us, worked and grieved and celebrated within these walls, and to demolish it is to erase a sentence from a city's autobiography that cannot be rewritten. There is an economic argument too, often forgotten: the greenest building, it is said, is the one already standing, since construction is among the most carbon-intensive things a society does. And there is a human one — places that hold their age give residents a sense of continuity and belonging that no new development, however clever, can manufacture overnight. A society that bulldozes its past for the convenience of the present is, on this view, impoverishing itself in ways it will only notice once the loss is irreversible.

Yet the opposing case is not the philistine's case it is sometimes painted as. Cities are not museums; they are machines for living, and the living have needs the dead did not. A society that preserves indiscriminately freezes itself, condemning each generation to inhabit the priorities of the last. The handsome old terrace may be uninsulable, inaccessible to the disabled, and far too small for the families who now need homes; the cherished factory may stand empty in the one place a hospital could be built. To insist on preservation as a default is, sometimes, to choose a beautiful past over a liveable present — and to do so most comfortably from a position that already has somewhere to live. There is, buried in much preservationism, an unequal politics: it is easy to romanticise the old city when one is not the family priced out of it.

Set side by side, the two positions begin to reveal what they share. Both, in fact, are trying to serve the same thing — the people who will use the city — and both can betray it. The preservationist betrays it by mistaking the building for the life it once held; the moderniser betrays it by mistaking newness for improvement, clearing the irreplaceable to build the forgettable. The quarrel is fiercest, and least useful, when it is fought as old-versus-new, because that framing treats buildings as ENDS. The moment we treat them instead as means — to memory, to shelter, to belonging, to function — the question changes shape.

What replaces 'preserve or replace', then, is a harder and better question: which buildings, and for whom, and at what cost to what else? Some structures earn preservation because their meaning to a community genuinely outweighs the use of their ground; others should go, not from contempt for the past but because the living have a stronger claim on that particular site than the dead do. The wisest cities seem to know the difference — they restore the cathedral and rebuild the warehouse, weave the old facade into the new interior, and refuse the false tidiness of a single rule.

So the view that a society should always preserve rather than replace is, finally, too neat to be true, and so is its opposite. A city is not honoured by being embalmed, nor by being endlessly demolished; it is honoured by being CHOSEN, building by building, with a clear eye on what each one is for and whom it serves. Preservation is not the answer. The answer is judgement — and the willingness, each time, to earn it.

My overriding aim was to write a piece that genuinely EXPLORED rather than argued, so almost every structural decision was made to protect balance and to set up a synthesis that re-frames rather than picks a winner.

I used a broadly BLOCK arrangement — preservation in full, then replacement in full, then a synthesis — because each position here is a coherent worldview that needed room to be felt as a whole before being tested. To manage the well-known risk of block (the reader losing the thesis across a long antithesis), I built in long-range cohesion: I opened on a controlling idea, the city as 'an argument with itself about time', returned to it at the synthesis, and carried a single key question ('what is a building FOR?') as a thread from the introduction through to the conclusion, so the essay would read as one designed movement rather than three stacked blocks.

The turns between phases are signposted with deliberate adversatives and concessives — 'Yet the opposing case is not the philistine's case', 'Set side by side, the two positions begin to reveal what they share' — partly to navigate the reader and partly to make the act of WEIGHING visible to the examiner. I worked hard on balance: I gave the modernising antithesis the same depth and dignity as the thesis, and I deliberately complicated the more 'sympathetic' preservationist view by exposing its hidden class politics, precisely so the essay could not be accused of letting one side collapse.

The conclusion was engineered to be qualified, not fence-sitting. Rather than declaring preservation right or wrong, I re-framed the question by recasting buildings as MEANS rather than ENDS, which let me reach a position that is conditional ('which buildings, and for whom') yet still committed ('the answer is judgement'). I signalled the re-frame explicitly ('What replaces "preserve or replace"… is a harder and better question') so the synthesis would clearly be doing new work, not summarising.

On reflection, my one structural risk is that the synthesis runs across two paragraphs and could feel slightly extended; if revising, I would tighten the penultimate paragraph so the final judgement lands with less delay.