QCE English analytical extended response (IA2) quiz

Persuasive writing on a contemporary issue

An analytical extended response on a literary text or texts, applying a chosen critical perspective

Creative writing in a chosen form

An oral presentation

A negative opinion of the text

A theoretical framework (feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, psychoanalytic, ecocritical, reader-response) used to ask new questions of the text

Your personal feelings about the text

A summary of what critics have said

Quoting too much from the text

Heavy theory paired with thin textual analysis (a piece that talks about feminism in the abstract more than it engages with the text itself)

Writing in formal register

Picking an unusual perspective

A feminist reading reveals that women in the text are oppressed.

The text uses many techniques to engage with gender.

The text's repeated return to enclosed spaces (the room, the cabin, the drawer) builds a spatial vocabulary for the female protagonist's restricted agency, suggesting that gendered constraint operates spatially before it operates discursively.

The text is feminist.

The perspective is the answer; the text is the evidence

The perspective is the tool to find a reading; the reading is your argument, supported by close textual analysis

The perspective should replace close reading

Apply the perspective uniformly to every sentence

Conversational and personal

Formal academic third-person; no 'I think' or first-person opinion

Persuasive with emotional appeals

Discursive and exploratory

1 or 2

6 to 10 short embedded quotes (under 10 words each) distributed across three or four body paragraphs

20 or more

Just one long quote per paragraph

Yes, more perspectives means more sophistication

No, a single perspective applied carefully scores higher than two perspectives both applied shallowly

Yes, combining is required for A-band

Only feminist and postcolonial can be combined

Apologising for using theory

Recognising the perspective's limits (e.g. 'while a feminist reading foregrounds X, the text also...'), which signals theoretical sophistication

Removing the perspective from the essay

Listing all the perspectives you considered

Externally by QCAA assessors only

By your teacher against QCAA criteria, then confirmed through QCAA's endorsement process

By computer scoring

By a panel of external markers