I know you guys think this is hard, and you think I’m mad when I say this is easy – but it really is! You do need to know all your quotes though, and it is SUPER important that you remember you essay structure. You are making an argument in your critical essay, a critical one, where you investigate and analyse the text. You should be making a clear POINT at the start of each paragraph, backing it up with clear EVIDENCE from the text, EXPLAINING how these quotes develop your point and finally LINKing it back to the main question.
This gives a minimum of four sentences in each paragraph of the essay. If you are sitting Higher, you should be putting in A LOT more analysis on your quotes. You should also be using more than one quote in some of your paragraphs. This will give you a PEEEEL structure in some of your paragraphs.
This sounds like a lot of work, but if you have selected your quotes carefully, then they are actually going to do most of the work for you.
Let’s take a closer look. We’re going to take The Kite Runner as our sample text. The 2018 Higher class have been studying this and they have chosen the following quotes:
1. ‘it was the look of the lamb’
2. ‘Coward! Coward!’
3. ‘in thin, raspy voice: ‘Yes.”
4. ‘There is a way to be good again’
5. ‘My body was broken… but I was healed. I laughed.’
6. ‘You will not refer to him as that Hazara boy in my presence again. He has a name and it is Sohrab.’
7. ‘It was only a smile, nothing more, but I’ll take it.’
8. ‘For you a thousand times over.’
That’s the quotes sorted out. Now we need to think about setting up an essay. Your introduction is important because it sets the scene. Take a look at these questions from the 2015 Higher paper:
4. Choose a novel or short story in which the method of narration is important. Outline briefly the writer’s method of narration and explain why you feel this method makes such a major contribution to your understanding of the text as a whole.
5. Choose a novel or short story in which there is a moment of significance for one of the characters. Explain briefly what the significant moment is and discuss, with reference to appropriate techniques, its significance to the text as a whole.
6. Choose a novel or short story which has a satisfying ending. Discuss to what extent the ending provides a successful conclusion to the text as a whole.
The first question is answerable but it’s not something we’ve focused on in class. Question 5 and 6 however are perfect for us. Take a look at the sample intro’s below. I’ve put them side by side so you can see how similar they are, and that we are simply tailoring our response to suit the actual question. Note how they use the same idea but tweak it to fit the question:
Now on to the first paragraph. We need to make clear our line of thought here, utilise our evidence and tie it back to the main argument of the text. Take a look at these two:
See how they use the exact same evidence and analysis? The POINT is more or less the same, but worded to suit the intent of the question, the same thing has happened with the link back to tie it in to the question.
Let’s take a look at the rest of both essays and see how the conclusion would work:
And that’s it!
(And yes, I am aware there are some grammatical and spelling errors in the above, but I think we can live with them for just now in the name of having Prelim revision materials!)
