OCR A-Level English Literature: literary criticism, context and the assessment objectives overview quiz quiz

Detailed knowledge of the author's life and biography

The sheer number of quotations packed into an answer

The analysis of how meanings are shaped in texts

The overall length and word count of the essay

AO4 (about 30 percent) and AO5 (about 25 percent)

AO1 (about 30 percent) and AO4 (about 25 percent)

AO5 (about 30 percent) and AO1 (about 25 percent)

AO2 (about 30 percent) and AO3 (about 25 percent)

AO2

AO3

AO4

AO5

AO2 (analysis of how meaning is shaped in texts)

AO3 (context of production and reception)

AO5 (interpretations and contested meaning)

AO1 (informed personal response in writing)

The writer's use of language and the structure of the whole text and the way its parts are arranged

The plot of the narrative and the central themes a reader can trace through it

Context of production (the world a text was written in) and context of reception (how it is read)

The conventions of the drama form set against those of the prose form

Whether the historical fact is interesting and impressive to include for its own sake

Whether the contextual point happens to be about the life of the author of the text

Whether the contextual material is recent and drawn from modern scholarship

Whether removing the contextual point would weaken your reading of a specific moment

A critical reading, a performance choice, or a reading that weights one theme or value over another

Only the directly quoted words of a published academic critic can ever count as an interpretation here

A clear summary of the plot and the sequence of events as they unfold in the text

A precise historical date that fixes when the text was first written or published

Listing the names of as many published literary critics as you can possibly fit into the answer

Keeping opposed readings genuinely in play and reaching a judgement on the evidence

Choosing a single reading early and ignoring every plausible alternative to it

Avoiding any clear position so the answer cannot be marked down as one-sided

Two pre-1900 texts (one prose and one drama), at least one originally written in translation

One text of any period and any form, chosen freely so long as it has serious literary merit

Three post-1900 texts (one prose, one poetry, one drama), at least one post-2000, none in translation

Four texts in translation, at least one of them published before 1900, spread evenly across the three forms

They are assessed in exactly the same way, against all five objectives equally

Task 1 is marked on AO3 alone, while Task 2 is marked on AO4 alone with no overlap

Neither task is formally assessed; both are submitted only as preparatory drafts

Task 1 on AO1 and AO2 (AO2 dominant); Task 2 on all five AOs equally

Each task has a dominant objective, so concentrating effort there is the most reliable way to lift a mark

It is not really useful, since the marks are spread evenly and effort cannot be targeted

All of the tasks reward exactly the same approach, so a single essay template can simply be reused throughout

The dominant objective is always AO1, the informed personal response, in every single task