Writing: Balancing Both Sides in Discussion Essays

A discuss-both-views prompt is a specific promise made to the examiner in the question wording itself, and the specific mistake pattern this article addresses is candidates who technically mention both sides but only genuinely argue one — giving their own view a full, well-reasoned paragraph while the opposing view gets a single thin sentence, functionally treating the essay as an opinion essay wearing a discussion essay's opening. This costs Task Response marks specifically, because "discuss both views" is not the same instruction as "state your opinion and briefly acknowledge the alternative" — the prompt is asking for genuine, comparable development of each side before your own opinion is introduced, and lopsided treatment fails that specific instruction regardless of how well-written the favoured paragraph is.

The core discipline is roughly equal development for each view, measured not in exact word count but in the depth of reasoning and evidence given to each. A view that gets a clear point, a piece of genuine reasoning explaining why that point holds, and a specific example illustrating it has been properly developed. A view that gets only a bare assertion — "some people think cooperation is more important than competition" — with no reasoning or example attached has not, even if the sentence itself is grammatically polished. The test isn't length for its own sake; a tightly written four-sentence paragraph can develop a view just as fully as a looser six-sentence one, but a single unsupported sentence cannot develop a view at all, regardless of how well it's phrased.

Developing a view you personally disagree with requires exactly the same internal structure as developing your own opinion — a clear point, genuine reasoning, a specific example — the only difference is the framing language you use to present it as belonging to "some people" or "others" rather than to yourself. A common, subtle failure here is writing the opposing view in a noticeably weaker, vaguer register than your own view, as if signalling through the writing itself that this side isn't really worth taking seriously — using confident, specific language for your own position ("cooperative learning demonstrably improves long-term retention, as shown by...") and hedged, generic language for the opposing one ("some people might possibly think competition could maybe help some students"). This mismatch in register is often more noticeable to an examiner than the content imbalance itself, because it signals the imbalance even in isolated sentences pulled from either paragraph.

A genuinely useful technique for developing an unfamiliar or personally unconvincing view with real conviction is to imagine you've been assigned to argue this side in a formal debate and must actually try to win, rather than presenting a strawman version of the view designed to be easily dismissed once your own opinion arrives. If you personally believe competition demotivates struggling students, but the prompt requires you to develop the pro-competition view fully, resist the urge to write "some people wrongly believe competition helps students" (which pre-judges the view you're supposed to be developing neutrally) and instead commit to the strongest honest version of that case: "Proponents of competitive learning environments argue that measurable, ranked performance motivates students to exceed their previous results, citing improved outcomes in academic settings that introduce grading curves or public rankings." This is a real argument, stated on its own terms, even though the writer may go on to argue against it in their own opinion.