Answer Development
The gap between a competent A/L answer and a strong one is almost always the same gap: the strong one says what the writing does to a reader, and why.
The six stages, applied to a single paragraph
Understanding
Be sure you know what the passage says before you say what it does. Misreading is fatal and no amount of technical vocabulary conceals it.
Selecting evidence
Choose two or three short pieces, not eight. The choice itself is being assessed: a candidate who quotes the obvious line and the unexpected one shows more than a candidate who quotes four obvious ones.
Explaining technique
Name what the writer has done — a word choice, an image, a syntactic arrangement, a structural placement. Be specific enough that it could not apply to another text.
Analysing effect
Say what it does to the reader, and why it is placed there. This is the sentence that distinguishes analysis from description.
Developing the argument
Qualify, complicate, or meet an objection. An argument that never encounters resistance reads as unconsidered.
Linking
Connect the paragraph to your overall thesis and to the question. One sentence.
The same paragraph, developed three times
The example uses an invented text so that the method can be shown without reproducing a copyrighted work.
The narrator describes the house in great detail. This shows that the house is important to the family and that they have lived there a long time.
Why this answer works
- Accurate, and entirely descriptive. There is no evidence, no technique and no effect. This is O/L work presented at A/L.
The narrator's description of the house works largely through accumulation: the "third stair that had never been mended", the "door that opened only if lifted". The listing of small defects rather than of features suggests a house known through inconvenience rather than through affection.
Why this answer works
- Now there is evidence and a technique named — accumulation, and specifically the choice to list defects. But the paragraph stops before saying what this does to a reader.
The narrator's description of the house works largely through accumulation, but the items accumulated are all defects: the "third stair that had never been mended", the "door that opened only if lifted". The listing suggests a house known through inconvenience rather than through affection, and the effect on the reader is a peculiar intimacy — we come to know this family, as they know their house, through what does not work.
It would be possible to read the passage more simply as evidence of poverty, and the detail certainly supports that. But the narrator never says the family is poor, and the tone is not one of complaint; the defects are recited with something close to fondness. The passage therefore does something more difficult than establishing circumstance: it establishes that this house has been lived in long enough for its faults to have become a form of knowledge.
This prepares the reader for the family's reluctance to leave in the final chapter, which would otherwise seem merely stubborn.
Why this answer works
- Effect is now explicit — a peculiar intimacy — and the reason for it is given.
- The second paragraph raises an objection and answers it. This is what "developing an argument" means at A/L, and it is what most candidates never do.
- Evidence is used twice: first to establish the technique, then to defeat the simpler reading. The same quotation working twice is efficient and impressive.
- The link forward connects a local observation to the structure of the whole novel.
- Quotations remain short — seven words and six words. Length of quotation is never what is rewarded.
Phrases that force development
Use these until the habit is automatic. Each one obliges you to write a further sentence.
- The effect of this is… / The reader is therefore…
- What makes this striking is that…
- It would be possible to read this as… but…
- This is complicated, however, by…
- The choice of X rather than Y suggests…
- The placing of this so early in the text means that…
- Against this it might be argued that…
- The difficulty with that reading is…
The single most productive exercise
Take a paragraph you have already written and add one sentence beginning "It would be possible to read this as… but…"
That sentence does more to raise an A/L Literature mark than any other habit, because it turns description into argument. Do it to every paragraph you write for a month.