Prose, poetry and non-fiction

Prose: go to these three first

• The narrator. Who is telling this, and how do they know?
  • First person gives access to one mind and blocks the others, so everything about other characters is filtered through someone with an interest. Third person varies in closeness.
  • Phrases marking interpretation rather than fact — I thought, it seemed, as if — show the limits of what the text is claiming.
• Time, which can be compressed, stretched or jumped.
• Dialogue, or its absence. Who does not speak; what is said instead of the thing meant. He said and he said, too loudly are different sentences. Do not paraphrase dialogue — quote three words and explain what they cost.

In prose, track one thing until it moves

• Extracts chosen for this exam almost always contain a change, and finding the change is usually finding the answer.
• Follow one element as it moves rather than commenting on scattered features: physical distance between characters in the text's own units; who speaks first; a repeated object and what it means each time; the narrator's certainty, and whether the hedges disappear.
• A tracked element gives evidence with a direction. Three quotations forming a sequence say something no single quotation can.
• Read the first and last sentences together. If they differ, you have located the extract's movement in eight seconds.

Poetry: three reads, one job each

• A poem is short enough to hold in your head at once, so whole-text structure — hardest to reach in prose — is easiest here.
• First read — what is happening, literally? Do not analyse. Second read — what is the shape? Where it turns, where stanzas break, where sentences end relative to lines. Third read — the words.
• The line break is the one tool poetry has that prose does not. A sentence running over the break — enjambment — carries the reader forward and can suspend a meaning for a beat. A stanza break is a silence, and the last line is the most weighted position available.
• The turn — where the poem changes direction, mood or scale — is the highest-value thing to find, because everything before and after can be described in relation to it. It often sits at a stanza break, in the last few lines, or at a word like but, then, now, still.
  • Ask what changes across it: tense, scale, addressee, tone. Then ask what survives it unchanged — a word that means something different afterwards is the most rewarding thing you can find in a poem.
• Sound generates more empty paragraphs than any other feature. The alliteration makes the line flow says nothing. Tie sound to sense: the hard consonants slow the line, so reading it takes as long as the action does. Leave the rhyme scheme alone unless it does something — a broken rhyme, or two rhymed words connected in a way that matters.

Non-fiction: purpose comes first

• In fiction and poetry, purpose is one aspect among several. In non-fiction it is the frame, because the text was written to do something to somebody. Begin there, before any language feature.
  • What is this text trying to make the reader do, think or feel?
  • Who is the reader, and what does the writer assume they already believe?
• Every feature you then analyse is explained as a means to that purpose. A metaphor in a persuasive column is not decoration; it is an argumentative move.
• Pronouns are the most reliable evidence of stance, and they are routinely missed. You puts the reader on the spot. We includes the writer in the group being described — ask who is inside it, and whether the reader agreed to be there. They creates an outside group, so a writer who moves from they to we has performed a manoeuvre.
• Evidence. Ask not is there evidence but what work it does: a precise number sounds authoritative, an anecdote is vivid and logically weak, a named authority borrows credibility. A writer who counts something specific converts an argument into an observation, which is harder to dispute.
• Non-fiction structure is the order of the argument, and it is as analysable as narrative sequence.

• The concession — stating the opposing view fairly, then answering it — is the strongest move in persuasive writing, because it buys the reader's trust. Look for and they are right, of course, admittedly.
• The redefinition — a word the reader approves of, such as safety, care or progress, shown being used for something else — is usually where a column lands its final blow.
• Where the concession sits matters: before the main argument it disarms, after it, it qualifies.