OCR A-Level English Language and Literature: the EMC anthology (Component 01) overview quiz quiz

A bound set of practice poems prescribed for the Component 02 unseen prose paper

A collection of around twenty non-fiction and spoken texts studied for Component 01

A revision and exam-technique guide published by OCR for closed-text candidates to buy

The brief and marking grid for the non-examined assessment coursework folder

Candidates take their annotated copies in and answer it as an open-book paper

Students freely choose any three of the anthology texts and write a separate short essay on each one

One anthology text (or extract) is printed beside an unseen text for a single comparison

It is never sat under exam conditions and is assessed only through the NEA folder

Because memorising quotations and whole paragraphs in advance is explicitly banned by the OCR rubric

Because the prescribed anthology is swapped for a brand-new set of texts every week

Because reciting learned paragraphs in the exam is simply faster than thinking on the day

The question and the unseen partner text are unpredictable, so prepared material must be adapted

Context (mode, audience, purpose, period), key features and how they work, and likely comparison angles

Only the handful of key quotations that you intend to memorise and reproduce word for word in the exam itself

Only the author's detailed biography and the personal circumstances of its composition

Only the precise word count and the number of paragraphs the printed text contains

By analysing the whole of one text first and then turning to the other text

By integrated, idea-led comparison with both texts live in every paragraph

By adding a single comparative sentence in the conclusion to link the two texts

By naming as many language and structural features as you possibly can in each text

It always runs far too long and so the candidate runs out of time before finishing

It uses too much linguistic terminology, which examiners penalise as feature-spotting

It produces two separate analyses joined by nothing, so AO4 connections never happen

It is explicitly forbidden by the OCR rubric and is treated as a rubric infringement

Because pointing out any kind of similarity between the two paired texts is strictly forbidden by the mark scheme and is penalised

Because differences are simply easier and quicker to spot than underlying similarities are

Because the paired texts are entirely unrelated and so share nothing that could be compared

The texts often differ in mode and context, so reading how each achieves the same end by different means yields more insight

Production (who made it, when, why) and reception (how audiences then and now read it)

The accuracy of the spelling and the technical correctness of the grammar all the way through

The wording of the title and the full name and reputation of the named author

The overall length of the text and the visual layout of its paragraphs on the page

The genre of an anthology text makes no difference at all to how its language or meaning should be analysed

AO3 and AO2 come from reading the genre's conventions (address, structure, stance) into the features

Naming or labelling the genre of a text is explicitly forbidden by the rubric and is penalised by the examiner

All non-fiction prose in the anthology belongs to one single genre, so simply naming it conveys no useful information

Representation always distorts the truth, so any constructed version of a subject is by definition false and misleading

Representation is concerned only with visual images on the page and never with the choices made in the language itself

Language makes value-laden choices (naming, grammar, presupposition) that build a particular version of a subject

Representation is a fixed and natural property of the subject itself, so it cannot really be analysed in the language

It governs the punctuation of a clause and decides exactly where the commas and full stops should fall

It is simply another term for imagery, covering the use of metaphor, simile and other figurative devices

It is a purely decorative grammatical label that has no bearing at all on the meaning or representation built

It assigns agency: an agent of dynamic verbs reads as active, a patient acted upon reads as passive

The marks are in analysing how the language constructs the version (naming, transitivity, presupposition), not restating content

Paraphrasing the content of a source text is always treated as wrong and is heavily penalised in every single essay question

Social groups are a sensitive topic and so they should never be made the subject of any kind of close textual analysis at all

Such an answer is always far too detailed and dwells on tiny points of minor wording at the expense of the bigger overall picture