Your GCSE English coursework is a great way to practise and refine the important writing skills you will need to demonstrate in your English exams next summer — they’re also a brilliant opportunity to engage with and understand lasting works of literature in original and authentic ways.
If you’re working toward the Pearson Edexcel specification, then you’ll have to study two whole texts (play or novel) and write two separate essays of between 600-850 words on each text. One essay will be on Modern Drama and your second will be on a text from the Literary Heritage list. This means you could produce work on a play like An Inspector Calls or A View from the Bridge; as well as an essay on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, classic texts deserving of their stripes and your attention to their themes and craft.
But here’s the rub:
It’s really important to remember that these two assignments assess slightly different things. Let’s start off with Assignment A!
Assignment A: Modern Drama
For instance, in your coursework on Modern Drama (known as ‘Assignment A’ in the specification) examiners will mark how closely you demonstrate two ‘Assessment Objectives’, otherwise known as AOs. Here they are:
AO1: Candidates must demonstrate a close knowledge and understanding of the text, maintaining a critical style and presenting an informed personal engagement.
AO2: Candidates must analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects.
So, the first question we might ask is: How do we demonstrate a close knowledge of and understanding of a text? What does a critical style read like? And how do I make my engagement with the text ‘personal’?
Let me demonstrate how this works through two examples of the same point, one which meets both these AOs to a high level and one that doesn’t.
Let’s start with the one that doesn’t.
Imagine we were answering a question like this:
“What does the audience learn about Eva Smith/Daisy Renton from how other characters treat her in the play?”
We know we have to follow a PEEL paragraph structure, so one of our paragraphs could very easily look like this:
We learn that Daisy Renton/Eva Smith is vulnerable in society. We know this from the quote, “I threatened to make a row.” This is what Eric tells us he says to Daisy when he meets her at a bar. The word “threatened” tells us that Eric can be aggressive and given that Daisy lets him into her flat, we know that Daisy is vulnerable to predatory behaviour.
This is a decent response: it follows the Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link (back to the question) structure nicely; but through some choice rephrasing that shows a greater understanding and knowledge of the play, we can boost the level of this response even higher. Here we go:
Eric’s confession to Inspector Goole at the beginning of Act Three reveals how vulnerable women like Daisy Renton/Eva Smith are in Edwardian society. When the Inspector asks how Eric treated her the night they met at the Palace Bar, Eric admits that he “threatened to make a row” when she didn’t let him into her flat. The verb “threatened” is particularly revealing of the incident, suggesting that Eric’s seemingly ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour to Daisy, footing her drinks earlier that evening, has an underlying, dark and predatory motive. The fact that a man like Eric can threaten verbal – perhaps even physical – violence against Daisy, and get away with it, reveals to an audience how vulnerable Daisy, a single woman without the financial safety net of steady employment or income, is to the predatory behaviour of men, even those as supposedly courteous as Eric Birling.
Can you see the difference?
I’ve highlighted in green all the additional ways the second paragraph illustrates a close knowledge and understanding of the play; in yellow how I make my engagement personal and informed; and then in blue how I discuss meanings and effects.
The second paragraph is almost twice as long as the first: what’s been added is additional information – drawn from my wider knowledge of the play and personal understanding of it – to critically enrich the same argument that we see in the first example. But look how much fuel one little quote can give us? (Surely something to remember next summer when you’re revising quotes? It’s what you can say about the quote, not how many different quotes you can remember!)
Assignment B: Literary Heritage
Now let’s take a look at Assignment B (Literary Heritage).
Your second piece of coursework is worth the same number of marks as your first, which means you’re writing approximately the same amount of work for each essay (4-5 points is a good estimate, plus an introduction and conclusion), but here you have to demonstrate an understanding of an additional Assessment Objective:
AO4: Candidates must show understanding of the relationships between the text and the contexts in which they were written.
Remember there are a range of different contexts you can consider, including:
• The writer's own life and individual situation, including the place and time of writing, only where these relate to the text.
• The historical setting, time and location of the text.
• Social and cultural contexts (for example, attitudes in society; expectations of different cultural groups).
• The literary context of the text, for example, literary movements or genres.
• The way in which texts are received and engaged with by different audiences, at different times (for example, how a text may be read differently in the 21st century from when it was written).
If we’re aiming to write four or five different paragraphs for our coursework, it stands to reason that each new paragraph can incorporate a different one of the contextual bullet points above.
Say we were writing our coursework on Romeo & Juliet, our question could look like this:
“Explore the ways Shakespeare presents conflict in Romeo & Juliet.”
Here’s how we can produce a high level paragraph that meets not only AO1 and AO2 but, as you’ll see highlighted in purple, that all important AO4:
In the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare prepares audiences for the societal conflict between the houses of Montague and Capulet. In Act One Scene One, we are immediately plunged into Verona's civil conflict when Sampson and Gregory, two subjects of the Capulet household, speak of the Montague “dog” they meet in the street. Neither subject thinks they can show weakness before the other – nor before a Montaque – as it would show them for a “weak slave”. Instead the Capulet subjects use aggressive but also at times humorous language to express their disdain. Sampson says, “I will bite my thumb at them” which in the Elizabethan context in which Shakespeare composed the play, was a sign of great disrespect.
We could finish our analysis here, however we could push a little further…
…Using the Montague subjects as characters, Shakespeare is presenting the way conflict has infiltrated all levels of society; it is, in other words, a conflict between “our masters and us their men”, an observation which captures the hierarchical structure of Veronan society, where men would have to abide their master’s call to arms. In doing so, Shakespeare makes it clear that the world of Romeo and Juliet is one where conflict between houses and men cannot easily be healed, where “ancient blood breaks new mutiny” in an endless cycle of violence.
So there you have it.
Feel free to test your own writing against these paragraphs and if you ever want to be tailored, one-to-one sessions to help boost your English writing skills before your exams… you know where to find us!
Blog Post Crafted by Will
William read English Literature at Cambridge University. He wrote plays for the ADC Theatre, winning the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Prize in 2015.
He studied for an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University, before moving to New York City, completing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University as a Chair’s Fellow.
Passionate about literature, Will loves to share his passion for reading and writing with the students he tutors.
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