Paper 1 Question 3 Skills: Structure Analysis

Understanding Structure:

Structural analysis examines how a writer organizes and sequences the events, ideas, and information in a text. It involves looking at the order of events, shifts in focus, perspectives, and the overall progression of the narrative.

A useful acronym to guide you is BEST SECONDZ:

• Beginnings
• Endings
• Sentence lengths (relative to the surrounding text)
• Time (e.g. chronological, flashback)

• Shifts in focus (e.g. changes in weather, time, place, person, theme)
• Echoes from earlier in the text (repetition)
• Contrast
• Order of events/ideas (do they follow on from one another?)
• Narrative perspective (e.g. first, second, third person)
• Discourse markers & dialogue (connectives e.g. After)
• Zooming into description (be sure not to start analysing language!)

NEW VOCAB:

1. equilibrium: without too much tension
2. false sense of equilibrium: not as calm as it may seem
3. disequilibrium: a lot of tension
4. prolepsis: flash-forward
5. analepsis: flash-back
6. non-linear narrative: not told chronologically
7. frame narrative: is it a story within a story?
8. retrospective: told from the future, looking back at the past

Q2 vs Q3

Paper 1, Question 2: AO2	Paper 1, Question 3: AO2
Candidate response from SAMs 4 visit aqa.org.uk/eaqa "The sentence 'What had awakened him was the noise from the storm: wind lashing the trees, rain on the rooftop, and thunder' is important because the list creates a cumulative effect of all the threatening noises that are combining to make Alex wake up. Each element of the 'wind', the 'rain' and then the 'thunder' creates an increasingly violent picture of weather that nobody could possibly sleep through."	Candidate response from SAMs 4 visit aqa.org.uk/eaqa "The sentence 'There had been a lot of days like that since his mother got sick' is important because it is the first mention of his mother being ill. It reminds us of the nightmare at the beginning and at this point we understand the meaning of it and that Alex is scared she is going to die."
Chief Examiner's explanation This response focuses on one particular sentence and the way it is constructed at a sentence level. It explains the significance of a list within the sentence, where each part contains a threatening storm noise. When we read this sentence, it builds up a picture of increasingly violent weather conditions for us, and we understand why Alex has been woken from his nightmare. Therefore the sentence is linguistically important, and has nothing to do with structure. It would be awarded a mark in level 3.	Chief Examiner's explanation Although this response focuses on one particular sentence, the comment is at whole text level. It explains the significance of the sentence at this point in the text, ie where the sentence is placed contributes to the reader's understanding of the text as a whole. When we read this sentence, it makes us re-evaluate the meaning of Alex's nightmare at the beginning and we now recognise how scared he is. Therefore the sentence is structurally important, and has nothing to do with language. It would be awarded a mark in level 3.