Plenty of students tell Mrs Wear that analysing non-fiction is harder than analysing fiction, and it is easy to see why. A story gives you dramatic images to talk about. A newspaper article or a speech gives you plain sentences and an uneasy feeling that there is nothing to say. So you write a safe paragraph about word choice, add another, and hope. Then Question 3 comes back with a mark in the middle of the range and you are not sure what separated your answer from a better one.
Question 3 is worth twelve marks, which is the largest slice on the reading side of Paper 2, so a shaky approach here costs more than almost anywhere else. The good news is that the question is more familiar than it looks. Its wording matches a question you may already have practised on Paper 1, and the skill it tests is the same. What changes is the type of text in front of you, and the way you read that text decides what you notice. Learn to read it well and the question becomes far more manageable.
In this lesson Mrs Wear takes you through the basics in the order that matters. She explains how the marks and the clock should shape the size of your answer, what the mark scheme actually rewards, and what you must leave out. She also deals with a practical trap that has nothing to do with writing skill, and which costs students marks they have earned. Then she turns to the thing most students find hardest: how to approach different kinds of non-fiction, so you know what to look for before you pick up your pen.
At around twelve minutes, it is a proper lesson, taught with a real exam paper and extracts on screen. Mrs Wear is relaxed, direct and practical, and she is happy to say plainly what she thinks is useful and what is not. By the end you should have a clear routine to follow every time Question 3 appears, whether the text in front of you is a vivid piece of travel writing or a punchy speech.
Why this lesson is worth your time
- It explains how long Question 3 should take and how much to write, so you can pace a twelve mark answer.
- It shows you what the mark scheme is looking for, so you can aim your effort at the part that decides your level.
- It helps you recognise what kind of non-fiction you are facing, which changes what you should hunt for.
- It gives you a fallback for the moments when nothing stands out, so you never stall in the exam.
Who should watch
This lesson is for anyone sitting AQA English Language Paper 2, from students trying to secure a pass to those aiming at the highest grades, because the basics of this question are where many marks are won or lost. If you have already studied Paper 1 analysis, it will show you how much carries over. Teachers and parents can use it to see exactly what the question asks.
Make the most of it
Keep a past Paper 2 beside you and pause to try each idea on a real extract. The free Language Technique Bank is a good companion, since it lists potential effects for each technique and so helps you explain what a choice does. Take the quiz underneath afterwards to check what you remember, then practise a timed Question 3 within the week.
This lesson is also on my YouTube channel. Watching it here means you can register to keep track of the lessons you have finished, bookmark lessons for later and test yourself with the quiz underneath.
This question is worded identically to paper one question two, which is why everybody says they're so similar. You need to talk about one of the two texts, and you're going to have a specific line range where you have to talk about how the writer uses language to describe something. And that something is going to be something going on in the text, a setting, a character, uh an atmosphere, something like that. One of the big differences between this question and paper one question two is in the marks and therefore in the timings. This question is worth 12 marks compared to paper one's eight. And because it's worth 12 marks, you can spend longer answering this question about 15 minutes. Keep in mind that's 15 minutes basically to write your answer. You should have also spent a bit of time uh planning in your 15 minutes reading time and that's where you would have also already read the little chunk of text that you have to analyze because this question is worth more marks. You should also write a bit more for it too. My typical ratio is one paragraph for every four marks. So you can do that maths because we're dealing with 12 marks. You're looking at three paragraphs altogether. That doesn't necessarily mean that you need three completely different ideas. It just refers to the level of depth you should be going into. How many different techniques that you analyze. You could have just two different ideas, but you analyze it to such a degree that it ends up being more like a three paragraphs of length, if that makes sense. So, if you can't think of three different ideas, stick with one or two, but just increase the amount of techniques that you analyze as a result. To explain it in another way, if we think about the pages that AQA provide you, I typically find that students write uh one and a half pages for paper one, question two. So technically, it's more like one page cuz the page the question is on is already like a half page and then it's a half. For paper two, question three, I would say it's still a page and a half, but this time because the question doesn't take up half a page. It's more like a full page and then a full page. So this time you're writing almost like half a page more than you did for paper one question two. Even though the marks for paper one question two and paper two question three are different the mark scheme wording is identical and that means they are testing you on the exact same skill language analysis. So you can see from this little example of the mark scheme here that there are three bullet points that they mark you on. your analysis, your use of quotes, that's what they mean by the textual detail, and your use of subject terminology. If you've watched any of my videos on paper one, question two, then you already know I' I've talked a lot about um the importance of these aspects of the mark scheme. So, you could probably skip this bit if you feel you already know that information. But for those of you who haven't seen those videos before, basically, it's the first bullet point that is the most important. It's the quality of your analysis that is the most important by far in deciding where you're going to sit in the mark scheme. That being said, for you as the person who is writing the answer, if you don't get your quotes right, you're not going to be able to analyze well. So for you, arguably the quote choice is the most important because if you get your quote choice right and you have something you can actually analyze in those quotes, then you're going to find it much easier to hit that top bullet point of analyzing. Well, because this question is just looking at language analysis, you should at no point analyze structure. So again, just a quick recap on the difference. language analysis, you're looking at why the writer has used those words, why those words are put in that particular order, like in sentences, um, and what the effect of that is. With structure, you're analyzing why the text as a whole is written in that order and the effect that that has. You may have been told by your teacher to um avoid talking about sentence forms and that is because sentence forms can sometimes be seen as a gray area in terms of are you talking about structure, are you talking about language and also just because students don't tend to do it very well. Students tend to say kind of generic things. So if your teacher has told you don't analyze sentence forms, listen to them. But if your teacher has taught you how to analyze sentence forms and you feel confident of analyzing those from a language perspective, then go ahead and do it because they are technically language and not structure. For reasons I don't quite understand, paper 2, question three does not take the little chunk of text you need to analyze and put it into the question paper like they do for paper one, question two. That means you have to remember to box off the chunk of text that you're going to be talking about. The reason for that is because if you talk about something from outside that text range, then you're not going to get any marks for it. Let's say, for example, we're dealing with this text where the question was about analyzing the sea. From line one, you can see it starts talking about the sea. Okay? It's talking about the ocean. I I'm sure there's a geographer somewhere screaming that we're using the word sea and ocean as if they're synonymous. But heyi ho, the irony of an English exam being slightly inaccurate with semantics, right? Anyway, it starts talking about the sea, the ocean, uh, from the very, very beginning of the text. However, I shouldn't be analyzing how the ocean is presented in those very opening lines. The question said lines 16 to 26. So, that is the only part of the text that I should be analyzing. If I say anything about anything outside of that range, it doesn't matter if it is if it is the best analysis the examiner has ever read in their lives, they basically have to ignore it and pretend it isn't there because it's not from the right line range. So, for heaven's sake, people box it off to make sure you don't accidentally talk about something from outside those lines. A lot of students say that they find analyzing non-fiction a lot harder than analyzing fiction. And so I wanted my last tip uh to be related to that and and helping you with thinking about how you can analyze them. To be able to do that though, the first thing we have to understand is the significance of literary non-fiction versus just other types of non-fiction. Literary non-fiction basically means that yes, it's true. It's non-fiction, but it is written in the style of a fiction text. Now, AQA frequently uses literary non-fiction um in their exams. It comes up very very frequently because it's often a kind of richer style of text. What that means for you then is that when you spot literary non-fiction, first of all, don't really talk about Deforest. literary non-fiction texts don't tend to use deforest particularly heavily because they're trying to write like fiction when they use for example with this text we can see on the side here it uses things like um uh plural pronouns like our but I can't analyze that in the way that I would let's say if that was being used in a speech it's not being used in the same kind of purposeful way here he's just using our to grammatically correctly communicate how many people owned the boat. Whereas in a speech, it might be a means of trying to engage the audience by including them in the topic. So that's an important distinction there. When you're looking at literary non-fiction, it's not really going to be using your deforest. However, it will be using much more of just typical fiction techniques, specifically things like imagery, metaphorical language, their word choice, all that kind of stuff. So, again, if we uh look at this text, remembering of course that we need to stay within this line range of 16 to 26, we can see lots of that typical imagery that we would be able to analyze in a fiction text as well. So we've got the uh uh word choices like vast uh soaring the metaphorical language and the wall of white water towering the juosition in towering versus tiny and so on and so forth. So you're able to analyze it just like you would a fiction text in uh paper one question two. On the other hand, you can also get given uh in the exam non-fiction that is going to be much more rife with the forest things like newspaper articles and speeches. They're the kind of classics that you can be given in the exam. You don't tend to be given uh like leaflets or textbook extracts. Um I think that maybe has happened like once, but it's very very rare. The classics is newspaper articles and uh speeches. So, I've got here just like a chunk of a speech I took off Google uh because that uh exam paper that I've been using so far, both texts in it were literary non-fiction. So, this is still about the sea though. And what you can immediately see just from looking at this extract is suddenly the forest is just everywhere and it's huge. Okay, so we've got imagine yourself that direct address. We've got the sensory language, hearing the whooshing sounds of the sea, feeling the sand between your toes, the sound of the birds, the smell of the salt, etc. We've got the repetition. I love I love I love uh we've got I'm pretty sure that sentence is also a uh one, two, three. Yep, it's a tricolon. Um, and we've also got uh still our metaphorical language simile like an endless expanse of wonder. Oh, this would be such a nice text to have in the exam, wouldn't it? It's so ridiculously rich. Anyway, you get the idea. My point is that when you start by figuring out, okay, what kind of text am I dealing with? It helps direct you in what kind of techniques to be looking for. So, when you know you've got a newspaper article or you've got a speech, go on the deforest hunt. On the other hand, when you're dealing with literary non-fiction, just treat it like your bread and butter fiction. Look for all those classics in the field of imagery and juxtaposition and all that good stuff. If you can't see metaphorical language, word choice is your next best friend. Word choice will always be there because writers always use their words for effect. So, when in doubt, and this applies to any kind of non-fiction text, if you really can't find anything else, just hammer home on the words. If you do it well, if you look at how multiple words come together to create an accumulative effect, you can still get yourself a high mark. Um, you don't have to talk about ridiculously fancy techniques in order to get the highest marks. That being said, if you spent a whole answer talking about word choice, completely ignoring the sensory language, direct address, simile, tricolon, whatever, that's going to hurt your answer. You have to try and push yourself to the level of sophistication that the text meets. So, if the text uses metaphorical language, that's what you should be analyzing. If the text doesn't just analyse word choice.
