1. Answering a Paper 2 Section B Q3 answer
Representations of self? Language change? Audience?
Where is this? Political/ideological leanings?
How is language represented?
Tongue-in-cheek, using adverbs in the subheading – impact?
Nature of the humour here?
Reference to Noel Coward – what sort of audiences are going to be aware of this?
Audience positioning?
Metaphors?
How/why does she hedge?

3. I’m cursed with a mind that looks at a sentence and sees grammar before it sees meaning. It might be that I’m doing math by other means, that I overdid it with diagramming sentences as a boy, or that my grasp of English was warped by learning Latin. Translating Horace felt like solving math problems. Reading Emily Dickinson began to feel like solving math problems. You might think this is a cold way of reading, but it’s the opposite. You develop feelings. Pronoun, verb, noun — I like sentences that proceed in that way, in a forward march. Or those tricked out with a preposition, another noun, and a couple of adjectives. Conjunctions and articles leave me unfazed. If these combinations result in elaborate syntactical tangles, it thrills me. It’s cheap words I hate, and I hate adverbs. 

4. Evaluate this response to the question: Analyse how language is used in Text A and Text B to present views about the nature of language change.
In both texts, a playful tone is set up in the headline, creating a conversationalist tone and using humour that ensures that the audience feels a connection with the writer through the shared knowledge that a joke implies. For instance, the headline of Text A uses rhetorical questions, and relies on the implicature that adverbs haven’t ‘gone’ anywhere, but have fallen out of use, and the use of hyperbole implied through modifying ‘adverbs’ with the determiner ‘all’, further underlines this humour. This is then humorously and ironically underlined later in including the adverbs ‘sadly’ and ‘brightly’ in the subheadline – clearly adverbs have not all disappeared, and the attentive reader is rewarded with this joke. However, the metaphorical idea of adverbs disappearing is further underlined by the noun phrase ‘in danger of extinction’, positioning adverbs in much the same light as a rare species of animal, and language itself almost like Jean Aitchison’s ‘crumbling castle’ which must be protected from decay. In Text B, however, the humour and playfulness instead underlines the sense that the writer feels that adverbs are ‘cheap’. In asking ‘Could we just lose adverbs (already)?’, Lorentzen uses one adverb (‘just’) to hedge his request (further emphasised by the use of the modal ‘could’ which is often seen as a way to save face), and a further adverb in parentheses, perhaps ironically highlighting that although he has a personal vendetta against this word class, change from above is almost impossible to implement, as real use or change from below is a much more powerful force. Indeed, Lorentzen demonstrates a prescriptivist attitude, albeit plafyfully, in his use of the adverb ‘already’, which is often condemned by American prescriptivists as it is not used in its so-called proper sense to refer an action completed, but to denote impatience or frustration. This highlights the futility of attempting to fix or purify a language, despite the many attempts over the centuries.