Explain or Argue?

In Act One of An Inspector Calls, Mr Birling explains why he sacked Eva Smith, the young woman whose death the play investigates. She had asked for a small rise. He refused, and his reason fits in a single line.

“it’s my duty to keep labour costs down”

Read the line again and look at the word “duty”, which names something we owe to other people rather than something we do for ourselves. Why would Priestley give a factory owner that word, of all words, for keeping his workers’ wages low?

Now suppose your child meets this line in an exam. The question asks: “How does Priestley use the character of Eva Smith to explore ideas about exploitation in An Inspector Calls?” Your child has chosen Birling’s line, copied it into the essay and put the quotation marks around it. What should come after it?

A rule that is half right

A common piece of revision advice gives a simple answer. An explanation, it says, is anything that could start with “this suggests”. That does not mean writing those two words every time: “this implies”, “this shows” or “this hints” count just as well, as long as the sentence explains something about the quotation. Every new explanation, the advice adds, earns one more mark. It is popular because it is easy to follow, and part of it is true: an essay that says very little about its quotations will not do well.

Let us test the rule on Birling’s line. Here are two sentences we wrote ourselves for this article.

The word “duty” implies that Birling thinks he is doing the right thing. The phrase “labour costs” hints that he sees his workers as money.

Either sentence could start with “this suggests”, both are about the right words, and neither says anything false, so by the rule they count as two explanations and should earn two marks.

Now read them again the way an examiner would, with the question beside them. Do they say anything about exploitation, or about what Priestley wanted his audience to feel? They do not. The two sentences sit side by side like separate notes on a page, and nothing in the first one leads to the second.

The obvious fix meets the mark scheme

The obvious fix is to write more of these sentences. If two explanations earn two marks, then eight should earn eight, so a student who wants a higher grade should simply find more things that the quotation suggests.

This is where the exam board’s own words become interesting. AQA’s mark scheme for GCSE English Literature has six levels, and An Inspector Calls is marked in Paper 2. The word “explain”, in one form or another, appears in the descriptions of Levels 2, 3 and 4. Level 3 is headed “Explained, structured comments”.^[1] Level 4 asks for “Clear explanation of writer’s methods with appropriate use of relevant subject terminology”.^[1]

Then the word disappears from the mark scheme. Level 5 is headed “Thoughtful, developed consideration”, and it asks for “references integrated into interpretation”.^[1] Level 6 is the top level, and at the very top of it the mark scheme describes an answer that is “a critical, exploratory, well-structured argument”.^[1] We searched both of these top levels, and neither one uses the word “explain” in any form.

So a student who keeps adding explanations may be working hard at what the middle levels describe, while the top two levels describe something else: what the explanations are joined together to build. We think that joining is what the word “developed” means in Level 5. An idea develops when each new sentence grows out of the one before it, and carries the argument one step further.

The levels above are AQA’s. We checked the same thing in one Literature mark scheme from each of five other boards. None of their top levels uses the word “explain” either.

Edexcel GCSE, Paper 1, Section B, where An Inspector Calls is set: no level uses the word. The top level, Level 5, asks for “an assured personal response”.^[2]

Eduqas GCSE, Component 2, Section A, where An Inspector Calls is set: no band uses the word. The top band, Band 5, asks students to “analyse the extract and wider text critically”.^[3]

OCR GCSE, Component 1, Section A, where An Inspector Calls is set: the word appears only at Level 3, as “Reasonable explanation of writer’s use of language, form and structure”. Levels 4, 5 and 6 do not use it.^[4]

Edexcel International GCSE, Paper 2, Section A, where An Inspector Calls is set: no level uses the word. The top level, Level 5, asks for “a perceptive critical style”.^[5]

Cambridge IGCSE, Paper 2 Drama: no band uses the word. The top band, Band 8, asks for “personal and evaluative engagement with task and text”.^[6]

The middle levels differ from board to board. Every top level we checked uses the word “critical” or “critically”. We have not checked CCEA.

Our answer: an explanation is a chain

Our answer to the question in the title is that an explanation is the chain that turns a quotation into an argument. Each link in the chain makes one inference, and each of those inferences is attached to the point that the paragraph as a whole is trying to prove.

We teach the same shape for that chain in every body paragraph, on every paper, and it opens with a topic sentence that states the point. Next comes the quotation, together with the name of the writer’s technique and a first inference. After that come close analysis of a word or a detail, two effects on the reader or audience, the writer’s purpose, and context when the question asks for it. Every one of those parts carries an inference of its own.

Here is how our model essay on Eva Smith handles Birling’s line. The paragraph starts with its point.

In Act One, Mr Birling rationalises his exploitation of Eva Smith as a devotion to his firm’s profits.

Every later sentence in the paragraph has to serve that claim. The next sentence brings in the quotation, names the technique and makes the first inference.

Through irony in Birling’s business jargon, “it’s my duty to keep labour costs down”, Priestley portrays the Edwardian capitalist view that workers are nothing more than an expense to control.

Jargon is the special language of one trade, here the language of business accounts. The first inference, that workers become “an expense to control”, is small, but it points the right way. The close analysis then answers the puzzle about the word “duty”.

“Duty”, a word for an obligation to others, is attached to “labour costs”, jargon that turns Eva’s wages into a figure on a balance sheet, so keeping them low becomes a virtue.

This is the sentence where the quotation becomes an argument, because one ordinary word in Birling’s speech is now evidence for the paragraph’s point: he dresses up exploitation as a virtue. The chain then turns to the audience, and finally to Priestley himself.

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.

Thus, through Eva, Priestley perhaps wished to expose how, without workers’ rights guaranteed by law, employers held almost unlimited power to exploit their workers.

Go back now to our two test sentences. “Birling thinks he is doing the right thing” is very close to what the essay says about “duty”, and “he sees his workers as money” is close to its first inference. The ideas were already there in our two sentences, but they were missing the point they were meant to prove and the links that carry one idea on to the next.

Look, too, at how the essay’s sentences begin: “In Act One”, “Through irony”, “When the Inspector”, “Thus, through Eva”. Each opening tells the examiner where the new sentence stands in the argument, so those few words are the visible joins in the chain.

The same chain, from one small word

A chain can also start from a single word, even a very ordinary one. Our model essay on Mrs Birling argues, in its third body paragraph, that she believes her class can never be questioned. Late in the play, when she hears there may be no real inspector at all, she says: “Didn’t I say I couldn’t imagine a real police inspector talking like that to us”. The essay chooses the smallest word in that line.

The pronoun “us”, spoken as soon as Gerald reports that no such inspector exists, draws a protective circle around her class, placing its morality above the questions asked of everyone else.

The inference, “a protective circle”, is attached straight back to the paragraph’s point about a class that cannot be questioned. A student who wrote “this implies she feels superior” would have said something true about the same word. The essay’s version goes further, because it tells the examiner what the word proves about her class and about the question.

Counting helps, but it is not the aim

We agree with part of the common advice. Good inferences do earn marks. An essay usually gains from having more of them. When we rewrote our model essays on Eva Smith and Mrs Birling, we added more quotations and more inferences than the earlier versions had.

Where we disagree is on what students should be taught to aim for while they practise. A student who is trained to count explanations learns to make comments, one after another. A student who is trained to build a chain learns to make an argument. An argument is what the top of the mark scheme describes. We think building an argument is also the skill they will need at A level and university, as we argued in A Mark per Point?

Four things to do this week

1. Write the point before the quotation. Before your child writes anything about a quotation, ask them for the one sentence that the quotation will help to prove. Birling’s line, for example, was only a quotation until the essay said it was evidence that he dresses up exploitation as a virtue.

2. Ask “so what?” after every inference. Each answer is the next link in the chain. Keep asking until the answer is about what the writer wanted the audience to think.

3. Give every sentence a job. Take one paragraph from a recent essay. Beside each sentence, write its job: point, quotation and technique, close analysis, effect, purpose or context. A sentence with no job can usually be cut.

4. Look at how the sentences join. Underline the first two words of every sentence in that paragraph. If most of them could be swapped round without changing the meaning, the paragraph is probably a list of comments rather than a chain.

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

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