Quick questions on AO2: analysing how meanings are shaped - Eduqas A-Level English Literature

The methods differ by form, but the habit is the same.

AO2 analyses the writer's choices, so keep the focus on craft, not on characters as real people or on plot. Write "the poet stages", "Shakespeare presents", "the writer's narrator registers", to hold attention on the made object. "The character feels sad" is not AO2; "the writer presents the character's grief through the flat, exhausted syntax, so the reader feels the weight the character cannot voice" is.

"The enjambment carries the sense over the stanza break, so the hope built in the first stanza spills, unresolved, into a second that withdraws it, and the form enacts the loss the poem will not state." The line break is read to effect.

"Shakespeare isolates the speaker in soliloquy, so the audience hears the doubt the court cannot, and the fracturing verse exposes a mind divided against itself." The dramatic method is read for audience effect.

"The first-person voice catalogues the room in piling, unsubordinated clauses, so the over-precise observation charges the ordinary with threat before any event occurs." The narrative method is read to effect.

What is the move that defines AO2? [2 marks]

Why is feature-spotting not AO2? [2 marks]

Take the observation "the poem uses short lines" and turn it into AO2 analysis. [short response]