The four categories a connection can be built on
The list, and the one that changes at Level 3
- The Explanatory Notes say a connection may relate to a selection from: purposes and audiences; ideas, knowledge, and experience; language features; structures.
- Three of the four are identical to Level 2. The second is not. AS91104 says only ideas; AS91478 says ideas, knowledge, and experience.
- You do not have to use all four. A selection from means choose, and one category argued hard beats four touched lightly. Choose the one where your four texts genuinely differ, because difference is what gives the response its judging half.
Purposes and audiences
- A text's purpose is what it wants from you, not what it is about. Write it as a verb with an object: to reassure the reader that the decision is settled. To inform fits every text ever written.
- Purpose is evidenced, not guessed. Four things carry it:
- Pronouns — who is we, who is they, who is never addressed.
- What is explained and what is assumed — a text explains what it thinks you do not know, which tells you who it thinks you are.
- What the text asks for — a decision, a feeling, nothing.
- Where the text stops — the point at which it declines to go further is a purpose statement.
- Audience is the reader the text builds, not whoever happens to read it. Name it narrowly enough that you could be wrong.
- This category travels well across forms — a notice, a film and a broadcast can share a purpose while sharing nothing else.
Ideas, knowledge and experience
- A topic is a phrase; an idea is a sentence with a verb. Grief is a topic; grief is presented here as a change in what ordinary objects mean is an idea.
- Say what each text does with the idea: introduces, complicates, confirms, undercuts. Avoid the theme of: themes list, ideas argue.
- Knowledge is the Level 3 addition, and the least crowded route. Ask what each text claims to know and how: first-hand (it was there), reported (someone told it), institutional (a record, a figure, a rule), or withheld (it knows and declines to say).
- Then ask what each text does not know, and whether it admits it. A text that marks the limit of its knowledge is doing something a text that does not cannot do.
- Knowledge produces judgements almost automatically, because a warrant can be weighed: is it earned, is it hedged, is it borrowed from an authority the text never names?
- Experience asks whose experience the text treats as evidence — who is allowed an inner life, who appears only as behaviour, and whose account is generalised to stand for everyone.
Language features, and the translation step
- A mixed set has no shared vocabulary. A poem has line breaks, a film has cuts, a broadcast has interruptions, a notice has the passive voice — and none of those words applies to the others.
- So connect at the level of effect, not of name. All four use repetition is thin. All four make the reader wait for a word that never arrives is an effect, and every form can do it.
- The translation step, in three moves: name the feature in each text in that form's own vocabulary; say what it does in one clause; compare the second column, never the first.
- Effects every form shares: withholding, distance, attribution, rhythm, address.
- Three shapes, in ascending value: same feature, same effect (finished as soon as it is stated); same effect, different features (stronger — the effect was the decision, the feature only the instrument); same feature, different effect (strongest, because it forces you to explain the difference, and that explanation is an evaluative judgement).
Structures
- Structure is where a text begins, what order it uses, what it withholds and for how long, and where it stops. Five kinds recur: starting point relative to the events; order; withholding with a boundary; return of an opening element, changed; where the text stops.
- It is the least crowded category, because it needs the text held whole and most students work passage by passage — and it travels across forms better than any other.
- Structural evidence needs no quotation: a verifiable description (the sign first appears at 0:40), a count, a placement (the only sentence with a human subject is the last), or an absence with a boundary (no character speaks for the first ninety seconds). There is very little dialogue is unmarkable.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Using the same four-text set: Notice of Closure, The Long Paddock, Crossing, Fifteen Minutes. Build a language features connection and a structural one, then judge which should be the spine.
Answer:
Step 1 — name the feature in each text, then write the effect column.
| Text | Feature | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Notice | Agentless passives: has been closed | Removes the actor, so there is no one to reply to |
| Memoir | We were told, six times, never with a teller | Records that someone spoke and refuses to identify them |
| Film | The sale sign framed at the edge for eight minutes before it is centred | Keeps the cause visible and unattended |
| Talkback | The host cuts every caller the moment they name a person rather than the council | Prevents the actor being named, in a format that exists for naming |
The features connection: each text uses a different technique to strip the agent from a decision — and the fourth does it as an action, not as grammar.
Step 2 — now the structural connection. The notice begins after the decision and stops before any consequence; the memoir begins after the season is lost and stops years later; the film begins the morning after the sale and stops at the gate; the talkback begins mid-argument and stops on the hour, mid-sentence.
All four begin after the decision, and none of them contains it.
Step 3 — judge which is the better spine. The features connection is easier to evidence: four precise, checkable observations. The structural one is stronger, because it is a claim about the whole of each text, so it explains the features connection instead of sitting beside it — the agent is missing from the sentences because it is missing from the span each text chose to cover.
Why this is a Level 3 move: it does not report two connections, it subordinates one to the other — a judgement about which is doing the work.