Constantly told to 'develop your analysis'? Baffled as to how? Read on for my five simple steps to unpack any quotation.
The English GCSE is almost entirely made up of extended essay questions. The English literature paper is exclusively extended essay questions.
Whilst of course you need to respond to the question - that is, you need an opinion and therefore need to have actually read the text - the bulk of your essay will ideally be composed of fine-grained textual analysis.
For those of you who know your texts really, really well, this will come easily. You’ll know which moments are really important, what they signify about the plot, the key themes, the characters. You’ll have gone over and over this and you’ll know which quotes are metaphors, which use repetition to create a powerful impact and which have the most vivid imagery.
The beauty of all that, with your set texts, is that it can all be pre-learnt. Start revising now and you should have a solid bank of memorised quotations along with some well-rehearsed language analysis and terms to secure those A02 marks.
Unfortunately, even for the most thoroughly prepared students, there is that pesky unseen element.
As a reminder, the following questions are UNSEEN questions in the GCSE English language and literature exams:
English Language GCSE
Paper 1: Section A
One unseen fiction text to read and respond to.
Paper 2: Section A
Two unseen non-fiction texts to read and respond to.
English Literature GCSE
Paper 2: Modern texts and poetry
Section C: Two unseen poems. A 24 mark essay question on the first unseen poem and an 8 mark question comparing a second unseen poem to the first one.
So a healthy chunk of your literature marks come from the ability to read and respond to unseen literature.
50% of your language marks come from responding to unseen material.
So it makes sense to have a strategy in place: how do you analyse a quotation for the very first time in exam conditions?
Analysing unseen quotations - the process.
Firstly, you can’t isolate a quotation. You’ll need to have read the whole poem or the whole extract before you get to the nitty-gritty of individual quotation analysis.
My mantra here: read slow. Write quick.
I know that the impulse is to grab a pen and get writing, as soon as you can. I know you’ll be surrounded by students doing exactly that. But here’s the thing: they’re doing it wrong.
It’s a reading exam. Again: a reading exam. So take your time. Read slow.
Resist the urge to rush this bit. There’s no point in a hastily scribbled answer that has entirely missed the point.
Unseen quotations - 5 Ws.
I was thinking about how best to ‘tool up’ for this. You’re on your own in this exam. No teachers. No group discussion. Definitely no google. It can feel like you’re going into this blind. So it’s helpful to have something to cling to.
So I give you: 5 Ws!
5 questions to ask yourself of a quotation and write some really lovely analysis, all one your onesie.
"Read slow. Write quick"
The 5 Ws
Who’s speaking?
What is their perspective? What position are they coming at this from? Are they a strong personality? Does that affect the way you read the quotation?
When does this happen?
Beginning, middle or end?
Why?
What is the speaker’s why? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to express?
Writer’s why?
Keep in mind that your speaker and your writer might be different. For example, Priestley isn’t Sheila. He is using Sheila though, as a device through which he can communicate some important ideas. Why? Why use Sheila? To say what?
Words
Are there individual words that are used in an interesting way? Can you unpack one of those words and explore their connotations? Do any of those words help to create a language device (I’m cheating a bit there, but 5 Ws is neater than 5 Ws and a L).
How would that look, though?
Language analysis in practice
Let’s take this gorgeous unseen poem from June 2022.
Hopefully you’ll read it twice, slowly. If you haven’t - do it now, please.
Read slow. Write quick.
The question very helpfully gives you a good idea of what the poem is about: the importance of protecting and taking care of each other.
Let’s take this one, quite short quotation:
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
This is how the 5 Ws might look, quickly jotted down around a quotation that caught my eye.
What might this actually look like in your essay?
Something like this perhaps:
The writer shows the importance of us protecting each other in the final stanza of the poem; ‘The road will only be wide./The rain will never stop falling.’ Having observed this father and son in the rain, the speaker seems to have reached a resolve. The parallelism of the final two lines creates a tone of certainty; the speaker has reached the grimly realistic conclusion that life will always have its challenges - its rainy days and its wide roads. This conviction is reflected in the modifiers ‘only’ and ‘never’.
The beauty of this process is that it creates lots of ideas around one little quotation. Subsequently, you can write 'a lot about a little' and English examiners love it.
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