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Issues regarding your first 'A' level essay: Sheet No.1

The move from writing GCSE literature essays to GCE 'A' level literature essays can be a big jump for many, if not all, students. The following is a list of general issues you may need to deal with.

1) Avoid hyperbole and exaggerated statements of love for the poem or poet: "This is an amazing poem"; 'I really love this poet", etc. Although these statements cannot ruin a good essay, they tend to lead to waffle and generalisations rather than detailed responses.

Also avoid vast generalisations that can be applied to all and every text (and hence are meaningless): "very descriptive" means nothing at 'A' level, as does "She is good at describing..." or "very descriptive".

2) Learn a critical vocabulary. If you are writing about the end of a story, 'the ending' is not as good as the 'denouement', which is the literary critical term for the ending of a story. Similarly 'plot' is better then 'story-line'. See 'Critical Terminology' in this ISSUES section of our website.

3) Don't begin an essay writing about what you intend to do if it is already made obvious by the essay title, e.g. "I am going to write a critical appreciation of.....". Just get on with it!

4) Your vocabulary should be formal and educated in style. Avoid colloquialisms and slang. To write of a person as "mellow" or of someone as being "put down" is colloquial. Similarly the word "strange", often used when the writer does not really know what to think, is best replaced by more precisely-worded reflections. Statements about authors "putting across" their ideas is better rephrased with the use of the word"conveying". An character isn't "really sick", s/he is in a "disturbed state of mind"! Avoid "says"; use "suggests", as in "the author suggests". In the first place the author is not SPEAKING and secondly it is often the case that you will be writing about what an author conveys indirectly and with some complexity: "says" sounds too direct and oversimplified to be correct. Similarly, the word "speed" when used to describe the "tempo" of a poem is inappropriate. Avoid imprecise phasing: when you write of "brightly-coloured words" you invite comic misunderstanding.

5) Avoid "The poem is basically about....". Try to avoid reducing poems to something simpler than they are. "A central theme"is better.

6) Understand the POLYSEMIC nature of language: most images, metaphors and symbols have a variety of meanings and connotations. Authors usually exploit more than one of these meanings: "balloons mean happiness" will not be good enough because you have reduced the polysemic nature of the symbol to a single possibility.

7) Avoid characterising poems as having a number of levels: "When you read below the surface" or "the deeper meaning is". Poems are not multi-storey car parks. The multitude of meanings are in the words: you will gradually learn that you do not have to 'dig' to find them.

8) Learn how to quote correctly for 'A' level. There is a finely-tuned procedure that you will have to master. See our 'How To Quote' sheet in the ISSUES section of this site.

9) Avoid "The theme of the poem is". Poems themselves are polysemic. Is there really only one theme?

10) Be careful that you do not confuse the author of a poem or story with the narrator, especially when the narrator is a first-person narrator. All poems and stories do not necessarily convey the feelings of the writer.