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Drop it straight into the free Lang & Lit IO frame. The planning sections are free; unlock the full step-by-step preparation — close analysis of both texts, the connection, and the 10-point outline you speak from — to take it to the top band.
Start this IO in the Lang & Lit frame →CULTURE, IDENTITY & COMMUNITY
Issues about how groups define themselves and who is included or excluded — rich for pairing a novel of belonging with a public-facing campaign or speech.
1 · How advertising manufactures gendered body image and teaches women to self-survey.
The novel dramatises a young woman internalising an idealised body through narrative voice and imagery, while the campaign actively constructs (and complicates) that ideal through slogan, image and mode of address — a genuine dialogue where one text feels the pressure the other manufactures.
2 · How nations narrate belonging and exclusion to second-generation migrants.
The novel renders belonging through polyphonic narration and the texture of multicultural London; the government messaging constructs the same boundary through blunt imperatives, official register and visual layout — letting you analyse how literary nuance and bureaucratic rhetoric draw the line of who belongs.
3 · How brands sell rebellious individuality back to the consumer as identity.
The novel satirises consumer identity through its unreliable narrator and aphoristic style; the campaign performs exactly the move it critiques — packaging nonconformity as a purchasable self through portraiture, typography and voiceover. The irony between the two texts is the analysis.
BELIEFS, VALUES & EDUCATION
Issues about what a society teaches as true or virtuous — strong when a literary work questions a value that a non-literary text openly promotes.
4 · How public discourse frames who counts as a credible voice in matters of faith.
The graphic memoir uses image–text interplay and a child's perspective to question imposed belief; the official visual rhetoric asserts it through iconography, slogan and composition — a vivid contrast of who is allowed to speak and how.
5 · How the "self-improvement" industry reframes systemic problems as personal failings.
The novel's restrained, euphemistic narration normalises a system that should appal us; the wellness content uses soothing register, soft imagery and second-person address to reframe structural strain as something the individual must fix — both texts teach acceptance through tone.
6 · How war is taught to the young as honour rather than horror.
Owen dismantles the "old Lie" through visceral imagery and irregular sonnet form; the posters build it through guilt-driven rhetoric, direct gaze and slogan — a sharp study of how literary and visual texts construct opposite lessons from the same value of duty.
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Open the Lang & Lit IO frame →POLITICS, POWER & JUSTICE
The richest field for non-literary pairings — speeches, news coverage and campaign rhetoric construct power in ways a literary text can interrogate.
7 · How political rhetoric constructs an enemy to legitimise state power.
The novel exposes how language manufactures enemies and consent through Newspeak and its embedded "appendix"; the real speeches do it live through antithesis, repetition and the inclusive "we" — letting you analyse a fictional propaganda machine beside a real one with the same rhetorical toolkit.
8 · How the language of justice is used to protect, or to deny, the powerless.
The novel stages how courtroom language can perform fairness while delivering injustice, through Scout's framing narration; the press coverage shows the same gap between the rhetoric of due process and its slanted framing — headline, photo selection and loaded diction. Both let you analyse justice as something constructed in language.
9 · How protest movements claim moral authority through carefully crafted public messaging.
The novel examines race and voice through its essayistic blog-post interludes and shifting narration; the movement's messaging builds collective authority through the compressed slogan, hashtag, repetition and shareable design — a study of how literary and digital-rhetorical texts both fight to define whose lives are seen.
10 · How a leader's rhetoric turns crisis into a mandate for personal power.
Antony's funeral oration is itself a masterclass in turning a crowd through irony and repetition; setting it beside Churchill's real wartime cadences lets you analyse persuasive technique across a dramatic text and live political oratory — form, rhythm and the management of an audience.
ART, CREATIVITY & THE IMAGINATION
Issues about how culture values creativity, authorship and representation — strong with a literary work about art beside a non-literary text that gatekeeps or markets it.
11 · How a culture decides whose creativity counts as art and whose is dismissed.
The story dramatises the clash between living craft and curated "heritage" through dialect and symbol; the gallery copy reveals how prestige is conferred through register, framing and price — together they expose who gets to call something art.
12 · How creative work is commodified once it becomes commercially valuable.
The novel anatomises art, beauty and surface through aestheticist prose and epigram; the campaign sells the same cult of beauty through styling, art-direction and aspirational copy — letting you analyse how a literary text and a luxury brand both turn the imagination into an object of desire.
13 · How the imagination is enlisted to make a brand feel like a story you belong to.
Calvino foregrounds storytelling and the reader's role through metafiction; the advert serial builds an annual narrative ritual through music, restrained voiceover and emotional arc — both are texts about how narrative captures us, one self-aware, one selling.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT
Issues about technology, data and the planet — strong when a literary work imagines a future a non-literary text is busy normalising now.
14 · How the climate crisis is made urgent, or made distant, through the stories we tell about it.
The novel makes ecological collapse vivid and personal through speculative narration and irony; the corporate ads do the opposite work — softening responsibility through green imagery, abstraction and reassuring register. The contrast lets you analyse how language brings the crisis near or pushes it away.
15 · How technology companies frame surveillance as care and convenience.
The novel exposes how surveillance is sold as connection through slogans embedded in its satire ("Privacy is theft"); the real product marketing performs the same reframing through warm imagery, friendly register and the language of safety — fiction and ad copy using the identical move.
16 · How the promise of the perfect body is being rewritten by biotech and beauty tech.
The novel imagines engineered bodies and manufactured contentment through its conditioning slogans and detached narration; the clinic advertising markets a milder version now, through before/after layout, pseudo-scientific register and aspirational imagery — both construct the body as a product to be optimised.
MORE PAIRINGS ACROSS THE FIVE FIELDS
A further set spanning all five fields — each still anchored to a specific issue, a literary work and a named non-literary body of work.
17 · How diaspora communities are spoken about, versus how they speak for themselves.
The stories grant interiority through close third-person narration and quiet symbolism; the press coverage flattens the same communities through statistics, loaded headlines and photo choice — a study of voice given versus voice denied.
18 · How female ambition is praised in slogans but punished in practice.
The play exposes the gap between a woman's prescribed role and her selfhood through dramatic irony and the slammed-door climax; the campaigns sell empowerment as a feeling through montage, voiceover and slogan — letting you weigh genuine critique against marketed liberation.
19 · How the powerful are held to account, or shielded, by satire.
Swift weaponises a reasonable register and sustained irony to indict policy; the cartoons compress the same critique into caricature, symbol and visual juxtaposition — a precise comparison of verbal and visual satire as instruments of justice.
20 · How a society decides which deaths are mourned publicly and which are not.
The poems give voice and grief to the overlooked through dramatic monologue and tonal control; the front pages confer or withhold mourning through image selection, headline scale and placement — both shape whose loss counts.
21 · How the creative voice of the colonised is reframed by the coloniser's media.
The novel restores narrative authority through proverb, communal storytelling and measured prose; the brochures construct an exoticised "other" through photography, caption and possessive register — a comparison of who gets to author a culture's image.
22 · How childhood is idealised and sold back to anxious parents.
The novel interrogates innocence and its loss through shifting focalisation and the unreliability of a child's perspective; the advertising sells innocence as something protectable through soft focus, tactile imagery and reassuring register — both construct childhood as a fragile ideal.
23 · How pandemics and disease are narrated through blame and the search for an "other".
The novel turns epidemic into a study of collective responsibility through allegory and restrained narration; the front pages and posters frame the same crisis through imperative slogans, war metaphor and emotive imagery — letting you analyse how literary and public-health texts make sense of contagion.
24 · How digital platforms shape what a teenager believes about their own worth.
The poems' minimalist form and confessional voice both critique and mirror the platform that made them; the influencer content constructs aspirational selfhood through curated image, caption and engagement design — a sharp study of how the same medium can question and sell self-worth at once.
From a global issue to a top-band IO
A good global issue is the easy part — the marks are in how you examine it. The Individual Oral is marked out of 40 across four equal criteria, each /10: A Knowledge, understanding & interpretation, B Analysis & evaluation, C Focus & organization and D Language. Whichever pairing you pick, the same moves win: a precise, transnational issue named within its field of inquiry; close analysis of the literary text's form and language AND the non-literary text's rhetorical, visual and structural features with equal rigour; the two texts kept in balance and connected into one persuasive interpretation; and a confident, present-tense delivery built from your 10-point outline, not a script.
Build your chosen global issue into a full IO
The examiner-written Lang & Lit IO frame takes you through every section with the criteria, worked good-and-bad examples and the traps that cost marks. The planning sections are free — unlock the full preparation to analyse both texts, build the connection and your 10-point outline, and export to Word or PDF.
Open the Lang & Lit IO frame →Lang & Lit IO global issue ideas — FAQ
What makes a strong global issue for the Language & Literature IO?
It is specific rather than a broad topic, genuinely transnational, and belongs to one of the five fields of inquiry. Crucially, it must live equally in a literary work AND a non-literary body of work, so you can examine and balance both. Phrase it as something you can argue — how the texts present and construct the issue — not merely that the issue appears.
How do I pair a literary work with a non-literary body of work?
Pick a literary work whose narrative technique, form and language develop your issue, then a non-literary body of work — a named ad campaign, a public figure's speeches, a newspaper's coverage, a political cartoon series, a social-media campaign or photojournalism — that develops the same issue through rhetorical, visual and structural choices. The strongest pairings put the two in genuine dialogue: one dramatises the issue, the other constructs or sells it.
What are the five fields of inquiry?
Culture, identity and community; beliefs, values and education; politics, power and justice; art, creativity and the imagination; and science, technology and the environment. Your global issue must sit within one of these five, and naming the field early helps keep the oral focused on a single, precise issue.
Can I just copy one of these pairings?
Use them as a launchpad, but make the oral your own: narrow the issue to your exact wording, choose your own ~40-line literary extract and a comparable unit from the non-literary body of work, and build the analysis through your own close reading. That ownership is what Criteria A and B reward.
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