Quick questions on Close engagement and source fidelity in creative response: QCE English Unit 4 (IA3)

The IA3 marker reads for four kinds of carried-across feature:

It does not mean plot fidelity. A response that re-tells the source's plot in the same order does not necessarily engage with the source's craft. Plot fidelity is neither necessary nor sufficient for close engagement.

For every claim of close engagement, ask: is the source detail specific enough that a reader of the source would recognise it?

Voice is the hardest feature to carry across. A character's voice in the source is the result of specific syntactic and lexical patterns. To carry it across:

The tension between close engagement and creative transformation is real. The resolution:

Source: a realist novel narrated by the protagonist Anna, who recounts her decision to leave her family.

Surface details without function. Naming the source's setting without using it to do work. The detail must mean something in the response.

The 100 to 200 word reflection should name the carried-across features explicitly and argue what work they do in the response. A reflection that does not name specific features signals that the response may be running on borrowed plot rather than borrowed craft.

Carrying across a character means more than naming them. It means rendering them with specific verbal and behavioural cues that are recognisable from the source. A character's specific idiom, a habit, a way of dismissing or attending, a refrain.

The named or vividly rendered places of the source. A specific room, a specific landscape, a specific weather. Setting carried across should retain at least one detail that the reader of the source recognises.

The source's motifs, recurring images, structural devices, tonal register. A motif carried across does fresh interpretive work: the same image appears in your response with new pressure, or a slightly transformed version of the source's motif appears.

The source's interest in a specific concept, identity, time or place. This is the most general and most important category. Carrying across a concern means your response's controlling idea is in dialogue with the source's interest, not parallel to it.

A response that re-tells the source's plot in the same order does not necessarily engage with the source's craft. Plot fidelity is neither necessary nor sufficient for close engagement.

A response can carry across one or two characters and still demonstrate close engagement, provided the rendering is specific.

Pastiche of the source's prose can feel imitative rather than engaged. Carry across what serves your controlling idea; vary what doesn't.