Story Based on Homophobia

This story is based on homophobia. My daughter is bisexual, and training to become a teacher. When I released this on video, I was astonished at the number of English teachers who assumed both characters in the story were dislikable, simply because they are both gay.

It is also based on the Daphne Du Maurier extract from the 2017 AQA paper. It keeps exactly the same grammar and sentence structure and punctuation. This means that you can rerun all the 2017 questions using this text, to see if your students have learned anything from doing their mock.

Here is the beginning. I hope you like it.

Twitter Queen

Over the face of her keyboard, Regina began a barrage of abuse, and that was usually the way she spent such a brilliant evening – because a Twitter account, and a poisonous tongue and a quiver of quips are just perfect for some social media trolling on a laptop. As she tweeted the world on the web, swigged her wine with one gulp and spat at her victims in 140 characters, Regina decided she could have sold her mother for a viral tweet, something vindictive and destructive and glorious.

Regina gazed down at the screen; her fingers were buzzing and furious, the tweets whipping through the ether lacerated her victims with sarcasm and emojis, and their pathetic replies tweeting about this were drowned kittens. Her eyes were blazing hot, and she imagined the tips of her fingers and teeth could be sharpened with cold, mercilessly steel. There was an exponential trend of outraged followers – it seemed to be exploding out of every screen in the city – and each sought the same target, crying so softly, sobbing in her room. Regina laughed delightedly and shrieked at the 10 best tweets from her followers… she felt almost invincible. Inside her power crazed mind, the whole Internet of users across the planet seemed to worship her blank, airbrushed face.