Writing on Literature

Analysing and Evaluating

Answering the Question

• You will never be asked to simply write about literature

• A question or task will always shape your response

Answering the Question

• “How does …Stoker use language to create a sense of horror?”

• In your books, list the three words that tell you how to answer this question.

Answering the Question

• “How does …Stoker use language to create a sense of horror?”

Answering the Question

• Your job is answer this question as fully as possible.

• Aim to “think out loud” in your writing. In other words, show that you are exploring the issues raised by the question.

Answering the Question

• Aim to come across as someone who can think for themselves and can make judgements about what they are reading.

• Avoid listing the notes you have prepared

Evaluating

• A simple way of organising your answer is to decide on priorities.

Evaluating

In order of seriousness, order these events – most serious at the top

• A get away car is stolen• A bank worker is shot• A bank customer is wounded• 2 million pounds in cash is stolen• A parked car is damaged

Evaluating

• You have just evaluated a serious of events, using your own system of judgements.

• This could also have been prioritised from other points of view: the robbers; the bank owners; the police

Evaluating

• When you write on literature, you do exactly the same thing

• Rather than a single person’s point of view, the question is your guide to what is most important, what is least important.

Evaluating

• To go back to our question:

• “How does …Stoker use language to create a sense of horror?”

• It makes sense to order your response by discussing the most effective techniques used by Stoker first

Ordering your Answer

Order these techniques in order of effectiveness (impact on reader)

• Use of religious/occult terms• Use of violent explanations• Use of graphic violence• Basic premise – husband mutilating

wife• Dehumanisation of Lucy

Writing your Response

• How you start, and how you progress in the paragraph, has been decided

• But you will need specialised language to keep the reader with you

Language for Evaluation

• You need words and phrases that show the decision you have made about the techniques used by the writer.

• For instance, since you are beginning with your most effective technique:

• “By far the most powerful aspect of the passage is Stoker’s use of…”

Language for Evaluation

• Compile a list of phrases that could be used to show how you are evaluating the writer’s techniques.

• Obvious – Firstly, Lastly, Finally• Better – In a similar way, In contrast

to this• Find at least five or six of your own

Language for Evaluation

• These phrases and words will allow you to take the reader with you as you explore and answer the question, from the most, to the least important techniques.

Language for Evaluation• Which words and phrases help evaluate?• By far the most powerful aspect of the passage is

Stoker’s exploitation of personal relationships; Arthur pounds the "mercy bearing stake” into his wife, raising the intensity of an already brutal situation. In similarly shocking fashion, the writer takes this violence to a graphic extreme, “the blood welled, then spurted”, which makes Arthur’s actions so much more disturbing. So disturbing, in fact, that the reader suspects Stoker’s aim was to outrage as much as shock. To a lesser degree, cool, clinical descriptions of violence are used in order to disturb, “then we cut off the head”, mostly because their matter of factness contrasts with their emotive subject.

Language for Evaluation• By far the most powerful aspect of the passage

is Stoker’s exploitation of personal relationships; Arthur pounds the "mercy bearing stake” into his wife, raising the intensity of an already brutal situation. In similarly shocking fashion, the writer takes this violence to a graphic extreme, “the blood welled, then spurted”, which makes Arthur’s actions so much more disturbing. So disturbing, in fact, that the reader suspects Stoker’s aim was to outrage as much as shock. To a lesser degree, cool, clinical descriptions of violence are used in order to disturb, “then we cut off the head”, mostly because their matter of factness contrasts with their emotive subject.