Step 6 of 10
The concession is the move students systematically under-build, because arguing against yourself feels like weakening your case. Done properly it is the opposite. A position that survives its strongest objection is stronger than one that never met it.
Most students treat the other side as a threat to be mentioned and dismissed: 'some may argue the opposite, but this is not really true'. Nothing was weighed there. The word 'but' did all the work and the opposing case was never actually stated. Markers see straight through it and flag the essay as lopsided, because naming both sides is not the same as weighing them.
A genuine concession gives the opposing view a full paragraph with its own best evidence, taken seriously enough that dismissing it would look unserious. The reason to do this is not fairness for its own sake. It is that the concession is where most of your evaluation happens. You cannot push back convincingly on a case you never built.
To steel-man a view is to state it at its strongest, with the example its own advocates would choose, before you answer it. If you are arguing that a society has largely moved past a certain inequality, the concession should hand the other side its most uncomfortable evidence, the gap that has not closed, the reversal that runs the other way, and grant that it has real force.
This feels risky to students, who fear that a strong concession will convince the reader of the wrong thing. It does the reverse. A concession the reader finds genuinely persuasive sets up a rebuttal that has to be genuinely good, and the contrast is what reads as judgement. A concession dismissed too easily just advertises that you never took the objection seriously.
The token version states no real objection. The steel-manned version gives the other side a concrete, verifiable case (the 2020 HardwareZone fake post and the panic buying it caused), grants it force, then pivots so the writer's position comes out sharper.
The concession turns on a hinge sentence: 'Yet', 'However, accepting this obscures', 'Granted, but'. The hinge is where you stop conceding and start answering. It only works because the concession before it was substantial; a hinge after a token objection has nothing to push off.
After the pivot comes the move students most often forget: the link back to the proposition. Say what the concession does to your position. Does it overturn it, narrow it, or leave it standing under a new condition? A good answered concession exits with your main position sharper than it went in, because you have named exactly what survives and why. A counter that is raised and never linked back is wasted effort, however clever it was.
There is more than one place to put the concession. Front-loaded is the default and the safest under time: state and rebut the opposing case before your own argument, then build. Interleaved is more advanced: each body paragraph concedes and rebuts its own point, which maximises evaluation by construction. Chained is a senior move: concede, pivot, concede a deeper version, pivot again, each round escalating.
Choose by your control, not by ambition. The interleaved and chained versions read as sophisticated in a strong hand and as waffling in a weaker one. If the basic concession is not yet automatic, front-load it and do it well. The one architecture to avoid entirely is the afterthought concession that arrives last as a token, because that is exactly the lopsided shape markers penalise.
The concession is taught after in-paragraph evaluation because a whole concession paragraph is an extended act of evaluation. A student who cannot turn on a claim inside a normal paragraph cannot sustain a full paragraph against their own position. If the concession still feels impossible, the missing skill is usually the in-paragraph turn from the previous step, not the concession itself.
Get this move solid and you secure Band 5, because a real concession plus consistent evaluation is most of what separates the top of the band from the middle. The other side, taken seriously and still answered, is the clearest signal of judgement a marker can read.
Book a free trial lesson and see how we teach GP from the exam backwards, with marked practice against the band descriptors.