OCR A-Level English Language and Literature: the language of poetry (Component 02 Section A) overview quiz quiz

An unseen comparison of two poems the candidate has never studied before the examination

One essay on a set poetry collection (32 marks), assessing AO1, AO2 and AO3, closed text

A creative poem written by the candidate followed by a reflective commentary on the choices

An analysis of a printed drama extract, assessing only the integrated method and shaping

Check the spelling, punctuation and grammar of the poems for technical accuracy

Summarise each poem in turn so the reader knows what it is about before any analysis

Read how meaning is shaped (AO2) with the full integrated toolkit

Write at length about the poet's life and biography to explain where the poems came from

They are very easy to spot on the page, so they make convenient features to point out quickly

They appear only in sonnets and other fixed forms, so they reliably mark the genre of a poem

They control the rhyme scheme of a poem, fixing precisely which of the line endings at the close are required to chime together

They are where grammar (the clause) meets form (the line), so reading their effect fuses linguistic and literary analysis

Through person, mood, modality and lexis and register

Through the rhyme scheme alone, which fixes the speaker's whole character and tone

Through the poem's title, which announces who the speaking voice is before it begins

Through the number of stanzas, since a longer poem signals a more developed voice

Simply name that an image is present and label it as a metaphor or simile before moving on

Read what it does (what it compares and implies), often tracking its semantic field

Paraphrase in plain prose what the image depicts so the literal picture is made clear first

Ignore the imagery and focus only on the rhyme and metre of the lines around it

To memorise every single poem word for word, so that whole texts can be reproduced exactly from memory in the exam

Because OCR formally requires each candidate to hand in a map of the set collection beforehand

Closed text demands ranging across poems from memory; a mapped collection lets you select the right poems fast

To avoid having to do any close analysis by relying on a memorised overview of the themes instead

Simply to make the quotation bank look longer and more thorough when you sit down to revise it

Because themes are unimportant in poetry, so only the method labels are ever worth recording at all whenever you revise

To save time in writing the essay by letting you skip working out which poem a quotation comes from

A theme tag finds evidence; a method tag tells you what the quotation lets you analyse, turning evidence into analysis

You cannot cleanly split it into a 'language half' and a 'literature half'

It is written in a single sentence, since a true integrated point is always kept very short

It names at least five separate devices, proving that you can spot a wide range of techniques

It quotes a whole stanza in full so that the reader can see all the evidence in one place

As a separate parallel commentary running alongside the literary reading without the two ever meeting at all

Linguistics serves the literary reading: lead with the effect and reach for the feature that explains it

Linguistics should be avoided altogether, since precise terms only clutter a literary appreciation

They are unrelated approaches and should be kept strictly apart in different parts of the essay

Writing too much close analysis, so that the wider collection is never properly mentioned

Using far too many quotations, which crowds out the candidate's own argument and reading

Paraphrasing the poems and keeping language and literature in separate paragraphs

Ranging across the collection too widely instead of staying with a single chosen poem

As a separate paragraph of the poet's biography bolted on before the analysis of the poems

Omitted entirely from the essay, on the view that context is not assessed in a closed-text task

As a bare list of dates and historical events set out neatly at the start of the answer

Read into features: the poetic tradition and period that make a fused effect significant

Section A is on a collection, so an argument drawing on several poems shows how the collection handles the idea

It pads the essay out with extra material so the answer simply looks longer and more impressive

It lets you avoid close analysis by gesturing at many poems without examining any of them properly

It is faster than working closely on one poem, because brief passing mentions take far less time than sustained reading