Quotes or Events?

With the exam the next day, a GCSE student typed this question onto a large revision forum, capital letters and all:

“HOW MANY QUOTES DO I USE TMRW FOR A 9 english lit btw AQA”

“TMRW” means tomorrow and “btw” means by the way. On that one forum we found twenty threads about learning quotations in about sixteen months. Another student simply asked “how many quotes to learn for eng lit?”, without the capitals.

A number sounds like a sensible thing to ask for, because a number can be learned. But a second question hides inside the student’s question. What should a student do when they need a moment from the play and cannot remember the words?

Suppose your child is writing about Mrs Birling in An Inspector Calls. They remember clearly that, in the last act, Mr Birling telephones the Chief Constable to ask about the Inspector. That moment would help their argument, but they cannot remember a single word of the call. Should they leave the moment out, or use it without the words?

A moment can count without the words

A student who has been told that evidence means a quotation would leave the phone call out. The exam boards say otherwise. In AQA’s mark scheme for GCSE English Literature, the first assessment objective, AO1, asks students to “use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations”.^[1] The important words are including quotations. A quotation is one kind of reference, not the only kind, so a moment from the play, described accurately in the student’s own words, is accepted as evidence.

Edexcel and OCR use exactly the same words for AO1 in their GCSE English Literature mark schemes.^[3][4] Edexcel’s notes for its An Inspector Calls question go further: “Candidates will be rewarded if they make relevant textual references or use short quotations from the text. This includes relevant paraphrasing.”^[3] Eduqas’s top band for the same kind of essay asks for “direct references from across the extract and wider text, including quotations”.^[5] Cambridge IGCSE words its first objective differently, as knowledge “supported by reference to the text”.^[6] Edexcel International GCSE asks for “relevant examples in support”.^[7] We have not compared CCEA.

Priestley’s play depends on exactly this kind of evidence. Eva Smith is the young woman at the centre of the story, yet she never appears on stage. By the time the Inspector arrives she is already dead. Almost everything the audience learns about her comes second-hand, as events that other people report: the strike, the sacking, the rooms Gerald found for her and the money she would not take.

Our own model essay on Mrs Birling uses an event in the same way. In its third body paragraph, the essay argues that Mrs Birling is sure no real inspector would dare to question her family. This sentence explains why she feels so safe.

Her confidence has grounds, since Birling’s veiled threat in Act One, “ought to warn you that he’s an old friend of mine”, and his late-night call to the Chief Constable suggest a family that can reach the top of the force and expect its support.

The threat in that sentence is a quotation. The phone call is an event, with no quoted words at all, yet it supports the argument just as well as the threat does.

A quotation gives a student words to analyse

If events count, why do we tell our students to quote? Because a quotation lets a student do something that an event cannot, which is to examine the writer’s exact words. AQA’s second assessment objective, AO2, reads: “Analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects”.^[1] A phone call that nobody quotes gives a student no language to analyse.

Edexcel and OCR use the same words for AO2.^[3][4] There is one difference to know about. On Edexcel GCSE, the An Inspector Calls essay sits in Paper 1, Section B. That essay is marked for AO1, AO3 and AO4. AO2 is not one of its marks.^[3]

Here is what the words make possible. The Inspector says that Eric used Eva “as if she was an animal, a thing, not a person”. Our model essay on Eva Smith works through those three nouns one at a time.

An animal is at least alive but a thing is not, so each item gives Eva less value than the last, until “not a person” names the assumption behind the way Birling, Gerald and Eric each treated her: that she existed for their convenience.

An event would let a student say that Eric treated Eva badly. The quotation lets them show her value falling, step by step, in the Inspector’s own words.

That is why, for us, an event is the exception. A student might use one when the exact words matter less than the fact that something happened, which in our experience is relatively rare, or when the words will not come back in the exam hall. Either way, what earns the marks is the quality of the whole analysis. A quotation helps because it gives that analysis something precise to work on.

The obvious answer is more quotations

You may have heard that a student should learn fifteen to twenty-five quotations for each text. The logic is easy to follow: the more lines a student carries into the exam, the more likely it is that one of them will fit the question.

AQA’s own marking instructions suggest something different. In the instructions for its GCSE English Language papers, the board tells examiners: “It is not the number of references, but the quality of the comments that will determine the level”.^[2] That line comes from Language rather than Literature, but the top level for AQA Literature, Level 6, says something similar. It asks for “Judicious use of precise references to support interpretation(s)”.^[1] Judicious means chosen with good judgement. The fuller description of that level does mention “a range of judicious references”, so range matters as well. Every reference in that range, though, has to be well chosen.

Other boards’ top levels also ask for well-chosen references. Edexcel GCSE asks for a “discerning choice of references to the text”.^[3] OCR asks for textual references and quotations that are “precise, pertinent and skilfully interwoven”.^[4] OCR also tells its examiners that a student’s knowledge “will be shown in part through the range and relevance of their references to the text”.^[4]

We think this is the problem with aiming for a number. A student who learns twenty lines as twenty separate facts will tend to write them out as a list, with a sentence of comment on each. So the better question is how well a student understands each quotation, and how firmly each one is tied to an argument.

Our answer is three anchors, understood deeply

For each essay, our students plan three body paragraphs, each built around an anchor quotation, one taken from the beginning of the text, one from the middle and one from the end. The spread matters because AQA’s top level asks for a “Critical, exploratory, conceptualised response to task and whole text”.^[1] Nobody can write about every act and scene of a play in a single exam answer. Eduqas’s top band makes a similar point, with references “from across the extract and wider text”.^[5]

In our Mrs Birling essay, the first anchor is her euphemism in Act One (a polite phrase that hides something unpleasant), “men with important work to do”. The second is her admission in Act Two, “naturally that was one of the things that prejudiced me against her case”. The third is her question in Act Three, “Didn’t I say I couldn’t imagine a real police inspector talking like that to us”.

Understanding an anchor deeply means a student could explain it with no notes in front of them. They could say what one word in it does, what it shows about the character at that point in the play and what Priestley seems to be arguing through that line.

The three anchors give the essay its structure, but they are not the only quotations in it. Wherever a short line supports an anchor, we encourage students to place it inside their own sentence with a perceptive inference. By that we mean a point about what the line reveals that a first reading might miss. This sentence comes from the Eva Smith essay, in the paragraph built on the Inspector’s simile.

Yet, set against the simile, Eric’s reports that “she didn’t want me to marry her” and “wouldn’t take any more stolen money” create an irony: the “thing” he used is the only person in his story with a moral standard, since she refuses both a loveless marriage and stolen money.

The two supporting quotations are only a few words each, and neither needs to be taken apart word by word. Their job is to support an inference that turns the Inspector’s simile into an irony. The simile says Eric used Eva as a thing, while his own reports show that she was the only person in his story with a moral standard. Both lines are also reports of what Eva did, so the essay is using events and quotations together in a single sentence.

The Eva Smith essay is about 1,200 words long. As well as its three anchors, it quotes the play seventeen more times, most often in a short phrase of a few words.

So how many quotations should a student learn? Here is the answer we would give the student on the forum. First, three anchors for each text, known so well that the student could teach them. Then as many short supporting lines around each anchor as they genuinely understand. Quality comes first. A student who has quality and a good number of quotations as well has even more chance of reaching the top of the mark scheme. And if one line will not come back in the exam hall, the moment it belongs to can still go into the essay as evidence.

One paper works differently. On Edexcel International GCSE English Literature Paper 2, where An Inspector Calls is one of the set plays, the front page says: “Clean copies of your set texts may be taken into the examination.”^[8] On that paper, a student can look up the exact words of a line instead of recalling them.

Four things to do this week

1. Choose three anchors for one set text. Take one quotation from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the end, each about the same main character or theme.

2. Ask your child to explain one anchor with the book closed. Ask which single word in it matters most, and why. If the answer is a long pause, that anchor needs more work before any new quotations are added.

3. Find two short supporting lines for each anchor. For each line, write one sentence that says what it reveals, as our Eva Smith sentence does.

4. Practise one event sentence. Pick a moment your child can picture but cannot quote, and ask them to describe it in one precise sentence and then say what it shows. Birling’s phone call to the Chief Constable is a good example to copy.

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

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