How do you analyse a whole prose set text as both a crafted narrative and a structured piece of language?
Studying the prose set text for Telling Stories: narrative structure, characterisation, point of view and style, analysed through the integrated language and literature method.
How to analyse the AQA Telling Stories prose set text as narrative and language, covering structure, characterisation, point of view and style, and how to link named linguistic features to narrative effect for the closed-book exam.
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What this dot point is asking
The prose set text is studied as a complete narrative and as a body of language. You must know the whole text well enough to discuss its structure, characters, themes and narration, and to support every literary point with precise linguistic evidence. The Paper 1 question is usually closed-book and asks you to analyse how the writer tells the story, so you select a passage or thread and show how lexical, grammatical and discourse choices construct meaning and position the reader.
Reading the text as narrative
A set text is more than its plot. Examiners reward analysis of narrative structure (chronology, gaps, flashback, framing), characterisation (how the reader is led to judge characters), theme and the narrative voice that holds it together. Map the text before the exam: who narrates, in what order events are told, and where the writer slows down or speeds up. Notice the architecture, such as a framing narrative that nests one story inside another, a non-linear order that withholds key information, or a structural symmetry that mirrors a theme. These large-scale choices are as analysable as any sentence, and a question on how the writer tells the story invites you to discuss them.
Reading the text as language
Useful tools for prose, each tied to what it does: noun phrases and pre- and post-modification for how people and places are presented (the accumulation of modifiers builds a detailed or loaded impression); verb choices, tense and aspect for how time and agency are handled (the perfect aspect linking past to present, the progressive holding an action in ongoing view); transitivity (who acts, who is acted upon) for power and responsibility; deixis and pronouns for perspective and the reader's position; and sentence types and length for pace and emphasis (short declaratives for impact, long subordinated sentences for complexity or strain). Free indirect discourse, where narrator and character voice blend, is a particularly rich feature in prose because it lets a writer grant interiority while controlling judgement.
Style and the reader
Style is the patterned set of choices that gives the text its voice. Discuss recurring lexical fields, register, figurative language and rhythm, and always tie them to the effect on a reader: sympathy, suspense, irony or distance. A consistent stylistic signature (a habit of understatement, a recurring image-field, a characteristic sentence rhythm) is worth identifying because it lets you argue about the text as a whole, not just a single passage, which raises the level of the response.
How to revise the set text
Re-read the whole text, mapping structure and point of view. Build a quotation and reference bank organised by theme and character, favouring short, precise phrases you can analyse closely. Practise timed responses that begin from a literary argument and prove it with named linguistic features, and rehearse a few key passages until you can analyse them at word level under exam pressure.
Try this
Q1. State three narrative elements you should analyse in a prose set text. [3 marks]
- Cue. Structure, characterisation, point of view (also theme and narrative voice).
Q2. Explain what the integrated method requires when you analyse character. [4 marks]
- Cue. A literary claim about a character must be evidenced with concrete language features such as modifying noun phrases or transitivity, linked to reader effect.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of AQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AQA 201920 marksAnalyse how the writer tells the story in your prose set text. In your answer you should consider narrative structure, point of view and the writer's use of language.Show worked answer →
A Paper 1 Section style question on the prose set text, usually closed-book. Markers reward integrated analysis of how the story is told, not what happens.
Build a thesis about the narrative method (for example, a limited first-person narrator who controls and skews the reader's access) and select threads or moments rather than retelling the plot.
In each paragraph, fuse a literary point with named language features: noun phrases and modification for characterisation, tense and aspect for time, deixis and pronouns for perspective, sentence variety for pace. End each on effect and bring in context where it deepens the reading. A plot summary, however accurate, sits in the lowest band.
AQA 202116 marksExamine how characterisation is achieved through language in one section of your prose set text.Show worked answer →
The focus is characterisation through language, so the answer must work at the level of word and structure, not personality description.
Analyse how the character is built: modifying noun phrases and adjectives that colour them, the transitivity patterns that make them agent or object, the lexis and register of their speech, and the focalisation that grants or withholds their interiority.
Show how these choices steer the reader's judgement of the character, and reference context where period or genre shapes the presentation. Markers penalise character summary that could be written from a plot outline without close language work.
Related dot points
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How point of view is constructed in narrative: narration types, focalisation, deixis, modality and speech and thought presentation, and how these build the imagined worlds of the AQA Telling Stories texts and position the reader.
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An explanation of the integrated language and literature method that defines AQA 7707: how to combine literary interpretation with precise linguistic analysis so that named features evidence meaning, and how this differs from language-only or literature-only study.
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An overview of the levels of language analysis for AQA 7707: phonology and prosodics, lexis and semantics, grammar and morphology, and graphology, and how to apply this metalinguistic toolkit to literary and non-literary texts with accurate terminology.