Writing About the Effects of Language in an IGCSE English Literature Exam Essay

Writing about the effects of language in an IGCSE English Literature exam essay

Read the following three examples of comments on language taken from IGCSE literature essays and reread the assessment criteria. The poem referred to is The Storyteller by Liz Lochhead.

1) The writer uses interesting language to describe the setting, “as thin grey washed over flat fields”.

This refers to language but not “the way language works”. This type of comment would not achieve a C grade as it only describes the poem.

2) The writer uses language to create a dismal atmosphere, “as thin grey washed over flat fields”.

This begins to consider “the way language works” but in a limited way, it needs to go further to consider effects and the writer’s intentions. Why does the writer want to create a dismal atmosphere at this point in the poem? This type of comment is moving towards the C/D borderline.

3) The writer uses language to create a dismal impression of daytime, “thin grey washed over flat fields”. The words ”thin”, “grey”, “flat” all suggest that a dreary lack of substance belongs to the day, which is a contrast to the magic of the storyteller’s night. Lochhead uses this contrast to emphasise just how important stories are as a means of bringing colour and sustenance into lives which would otherwise be bleak.

This is much better, the candidate is now responding “sensitively and in detail to the way language works in the text”. This candidate is on the way to achieving an A. The analysis could be even more detailed, considering the emotional impact on the reader of the single syllables, “thin”, “grey” and “flat” and the alliteration of “flat fields”. As we read we feel the dismay evoked by the sounds of the language. Quotation Write your commentary on the language

EXAMPLE The writer uses language to create a dismal impression of daytime, “thin Question: how is daytime conveyed grey washed over flat fields”. The by the writer? words ”thin”, “grey”, “flat” all suggest that a dreary lack of substance belongs to the day, which is a contrast to the magic of the “as thin grey washed over flat fields” storyteller’s night. Lochhead uses this contrast to emphasise just how important stories are as a means of bringing colour and sustenance into lives which would otherwise be bleak. Question: How does writer create fear/horror in Signalman?

“Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight;”

“A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it” Question: How does writer convey madness and insanity in Yellow Wallpaper?

“This wallpaper has a kind of sub- pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about that silly and conspicuous front design.”

Question: Striking ways in which the future is conveyed in There Will Come Soft Rains

“The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.” Setting in The Taste of Watermelon, showing innocence and youth

“Mr Wills was a big man. He had bright, fierce eyes under heavy brows and, when he looked down at you, you just withered. The idea of having him directly and immediately angry at one of us was enough to shrivel the soul.”

Class difference in On Her Knees

“We pulled up in the leafy street beneath a block of Art Deco flats. You could smell the river. Even after three years at the university, whose lawns all but ran to the river’s grassy banks, that constant brothy presence stank of old money, of posh schools and yacht clubs. Sometimes it reeked of Law itself, of port and cigars, chesterfields, musty paper and the men who owned this city because of it.”