Hello and welcome back to Tutoring with Gavin. In this series of videos I'll be showing you different exam skills that are essential for you to get a great grade in your English language or literature exam. In this video I will explain the top tips on how to analyse the writer's language and how the writer uses language to convey meaning and to create effect for the reader. One of the most important terms you must use when analysing a writer is the word imagery which is an umbrella term from many literary techniques or devices that help writers to create a visual image in the mind of the reader. For example, a metaphor is one of the devices used to create imagery.
Okay, tip one. To zoom in and out. The idea of zooming in and out of a text is very useful for understanding what the examiners are asking you to do. Imagine you have a camera and you want a picture of the whole landscape to get an overview of the setting.
In literary terms this would be the genre, the audience, and the purpose. The text you are studying might be a biography aimed at people over 40 years old with the purpose of entertaining and informing. By understanding this you have zoomed out on the text.
When you zoom in you are closing in on the finer details of the language and literary devices being used to create imagery. This is the skill that the exam board want you to prove you can do well. Tip two.
A really useful acronym to use in the exam is DICE. which stands for the four skills in the assessment criteria you are being marked on. You have to be able to identify devices used by the writer to create imagery, meaning, or an effect on the reader, like metaphors or similes. You have to understand what the writer is inferring by creating this image. You have to be able to understand how words or images have connotations, which creates meaning.
And you have to be able to explain the effect this has on the reader. Your job in the exam is to roll the dice and provide a clever analysis. For example, you are given a paragraph to read that has the sentence, John exploded with anger.
You could write a concise paragraph like this. In the sentence, John exploded with anger, the writer uses an effective metaphor, creating dramatic imagery that could reflect his personality. The word exploded has connotations of sudden or unexpected violence.
Explosions are shocking and have a powerful, often negative impact on others. Therefore, the writer could be inferring that John's behaviour is negative or shocking, or that he perhaps has an unpredictable or dangerous impact on others. The slightest thing could set him off into a rage.
This creates the effect of anticipation or dramatic tension for the reader. The language devices you can use could include metaphor, simile, personification, pathetic fallacy, illusion, power of three, repetition, alliteration, symbolism, motif, rhetorical question, hyperbole. or superlatives.
There are many more, but you can also zoom in on certain dramatic verbs, or powerful adjectives, or nouns that have different connotations, like the word blood, which could mean an injury or family, but could also symbolize passion, horror, violence, life, or death. You can also focus on sentence types, simple, compound, complex, minor, or sentence functions, declarative, imperative, exclamatory, interrogative, or punctuation. exclamation marks, hyphens, ellipses, question mark. And finally you could look at the tone which could include sarcasm, irony, humor or could be emotive. Tip three.
Use transitional phrases to link your different points. The writer begins by creating, the writer then uses, the writer also presents. Tip four. Keep quotations short and try to embed them into your sentences to make them feel seamless. In the previous example I wrote The word exploded has connotations of sudden or unexpected violence.
Well I hope this has helped in your exam revision. If you like the video please give it a thumbs up and please subscribe to the channel so that I can continue to make these video tutorials. Until next time.