Deep or Wide?

Our earlier model essay on Eva Smith in An Inspector Calls ran to about 1,500 words and quoted the play five times. Here is one sentence from that essay. It is about a few words Mr Birling uses to explain why he dismissed her from her job at his factory.

“‘A lot to say’ — vague, dismissive, refusing to engage with the content of Eva’s argument, reducing articulate protest to mere noise; ‘far too much’ reveals Birling’s threshold: any speech from a worker that challenges the owner’s authority is excessive.”

That one long sentence spends all its length on seven words from the play. The whole essay worked this way: it came back to the same few lines again and again, taking each one apart word by word.

In September 2026 we rewrote it. The new version is shorter, at about 1,260 words, but quotes the play twenty times. We rewrote our essay on Mrs Birling in the same way, and the same thing happened: it went from about 1,300 words and five quotations to about 1,200 words and twelve.

So both essays became shorter and wider, because they now cover far more of the play. If your child could copy only one of the two versions, which one should it be?

Two pieces of advice that seem to disagree

Suppose your child is revising for the Literature exam and has heard two pieces of advice. The first says that three quotations analysed in depth will beat a long list of quotations mentioned in passing. The second says that quantity equals quality, so the more a student writes and quotes, the higher the mark. Both are repeated often, by people who know the exam well, and they seem to point in opposite directions. If your child asked you which one to follow, what would you say?

We have given the first piece of advice ourselves, and we still think it is right. We do not agree with the second. But the two essays above suggest that the first piece of advice is only part of the answer, and the exam board’s own words suggest the same.

Our examples come from AQA’s GCSE English papers. The other exam boards describe the same idea in their own words, and we show where below.

Comments decide the level, not quotations

Start with the instruction that AQA gives its own examiners for the reading questions in its GCSE English Language papers.

“It is not the number of references, but the quality of the comments that will determine the level.”^[1]

A reference is any part of the text that a student points to, usually a quotation. So an answer does not move up the mark scheme because it quotes more. It moves up because of what the student says about each quotation. An answer with twenty quotations and a thin comment after each one can stay low, however many quotations it holds.

The obvious fix for a disappointing mark is to learn more quotations and write more words. This instruction shows why that fix so often changes nothing, because it adds more of the one thing the level does not count. Depth is one half of the answer.

We did not find this exact sentence in the other boards’ mark schemes that we checked. Two Edexcel papers describe how well the quotations are chosen, not how many there are. Edexcel GCSE English Language Paper 1, Question 3, and Edexcel International GCSE English Language A Paper 1, Question 4, both say this at their top level: “The selection of references is discriminating and clarifies the points being made.”^[3][4] The top band of Eduqas GCSE English Language Component 1, Question 4, asks for “detailed analysis of how language is used” and does not mention the choice of quotations.^[5]

The top level asks for quality and range

Now look at what the top level asks for. AQA’s English Language papers have four levels and its Literature papers have six, and other exam boards count their levels differently, so this article simply says “the top level”.

For AQA GCSE English Language Paper 1, Question 2, which asks about the writer’s language, the top level is headed “Perceptive, detailed”.^[1] It describes an answer that “Shows perceptive and detailed understanding of language”. One of the things that answer does is this.

“Selects a range of judicious textual detail”^[1]

For AQA GCSE English Literature Paper 2, where An Inspector Calls is examined, the top level is headed “Convincing, critical analysis and exploration”. The examiners’ notes describe an answer at the very top of that level as taking “a conceptualised approach to the full task supported by a range of judicious references”, with “a fine-grained and insightful analysis of methods”.^[2]

Look at the two words that both descriptions share. Judicious means chosen with good judgement, so it describes quality: the right quotation, used well. A range means several quotations taken from different places, so it describes quantity. The top level asks for both at once.

The other exam boards describe the top level of a Literature essay in their own words. Each one we checked asks for well-chosen references:

Edexcel GCSE English Literature Paper 1, Section B, Level 5: “discerning choice of references to the text”.^[6]

Eduqas GCSE English Literature Component 2, Section A, Band 5: “pertinent, direct references from across the extract and wider text, including quotations”.^[7]

OCR GCSE English Literature J352/01, Section A, part (b), Level 6: “Textual references and quotations are precise, pertinent and skilfully interwoven”.^[8]

Edexcel International GCSE English Literature Paper 2, Section A, Level 5: “Discriminating use of relevant examples in support”.^[9]

Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English Paper 2 (Drama), Band 8: “incorporating well-selected reference to the text skilfully and with flair”.^[10]

Of these five descriptions, only the Eduqas one names range, with the words “from across the extract and wider text”. OCR’s instructions to its examiners also say that a student’s knowledge “will be shown in part through the range and relevance of their references to the text”.^[8] We have not compared CCEA.

The Literature level also explains why a range matters. Its first line asks for a “Critical, exploratory, conceptualised response to task and whole text”.^[2] A whole play has a beginning, a middle and an end, and a student cannot show all three with one quotation, however well they analyse it.

Deep first, then wide

So our answer to the question in the title is deep first, then wide. Quality is the priority. Quality and quantity together are better still, because they give a student more chance of reaching the very top grades.

Why would range make a difference at the very top? AQA’s GCSE English Language marking instructions say that students “may reach a given level by making one or more comments of the quality demonstrated by the Indicative Standard”.^[1] The Indicative Standard is a small set of example comments printed in the mark scheme. So a single perceptive comment can be enough to reach the top level. After that, the examiner has to “fine tune within the level to see how well each of the skills descriptors for that level has been met”.^[1] At the top level of Question 2, one of those descriptors is the range of judicious detail itself. We think this is why an answer that keeps the same quality across several quotations has more chance of the highest marks than an answer that is perceptive only once.

The Indicative Standard belongs to AQA. We did not find it in the other boards’ mark schemes that we checked.

The order matters more than it seems. A student who adds quotations by making every comment thinner has traded the thing the level counts for the thing it does not. A student who first learns to go deep on one quotation, and then adds more quotations at the same depth, gives the examiner more evidence of the same quality.

That is what the rewritten essays do. Each one still rests on three main quotations, which we call anchors, taken from the beginning, the middle and the end of the play, and each anchor gets close analysis of a single word or phrase. What changed is what surrounds the anchors. Around each one there are now shorter quotations, and every one of them comes with its own inference.

In the Mrs Birling essay, the first anchor is her phrase “men with important work to do”, which she uses to excuse Gerald to her daughter, Sheila. Two sentences later, two more short quotations arrive together:

It follows that the modal “have to” combined with the comparison “just as I had” suggests a sordid, immutable custom handed from mother to daughter for multiple generations.

That sentence uses two quotations and draws one clear inference from them, and the argument moves forward in a single sentence. The Eva Smith essay does the same thing with a sum of money.

So, when the Inspector explains that Birling sacked Eva for wanting “twenty-five shillings a week instead of twenty-two and six”, the small sum may turn an audience’s discomfort into anger at Birling’s capitalistic greed.

A student reading that sentence learns a quotation and an effect on the audience at the same time, and the essay gains another piece of proof from another part of the play.

Longer essays, less evidence

Were the earlier versions bad essays, then? We do not think so. They went deep, and the depth was real, but they spent their extra words going back over the same five quotations rather than bringing in new ones. The number of words and the amount of evidence turned out to be two different things. In the Eva Smith essay, five quotations took about 1,500 words and twenty took about 1,260.

Our own rule for these essays was to aim for about 1,000 words, with clarity and depth coming first. Going over was allowed, as long as no sentence was there only to make the essay longer. Both essays went over, to about 1,200 words, because each extra quotation arrived with an inference that added something to the argument.

We think this is also the fairest answer to the idea that quantity equals quality. Quantity does help, but only when it means more quotations, each with a real inference. More words on their own add nothing, while more well-chosen quotations give the examiner more of exactly what the top level describes.

The order also matters in the exam itself, where time is short. A student who is running out of time should protect the depth of the paragraph in front of them, and add range only when the depth is already there.

Four things to do this week

1. Find the inference after every quotation. Take one recent essay and underline each quotation. After each one, look for the words that say what it suggests, implies or reveals. A quotation with nothing after it is only a reference, and on its own it earns very little.

2. Take one anchor deeper before adding anything. Choose the strongest quotation in the essay and ask which single word in it does the most work, and why the writer chose that word rather than another.

3. Then add two short quotations around it. Take them from the same scene, and give each one its own inference, as the Mrs Birling essay does with “have to” and “just as I had”.

4. Check the range across the whole text. Beside each quotation, write where it comes from: the beginning, the middle or the end. If they all come from one scene, the essay is deep in one place and says little about the rest of the play.

If you would like to know where your child’s own writing stands today, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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