Exam Skills

The assessment objectives, in plain language

The question is worth 60 marks, split across five objectives. Knowing where the marks sit tells you where to spend your time: AO2, close analysis, is worth as much as the other four put together.

AO	Marks	What it rewards
AO1	10	A clear, well-organised argument in an academic register, present tense, accurate terms.
AO2	20	Close analysis of language, form and structure: how meanings are shaped. The biggest mark.
AO3	10	Relevant context, woven in and returned to the poem, not bolted on.
AO4	10	Close, thoughtful connections between a Heaney poem and a Sheers poem.
AO5	10	Different interpretations embedded and weighed for how far you accept them.

Marked against the current published Eduqas grid; weightings paraphrased here, not reproduced.

The one principle

Naming a device is labelling, not analysis. The family catchphrase, and the difference between a C and an A

Spotting a caesura earns nothing. Marks live in effect: what the caesura does to the reader, the argument or the feeling. Always move from the method to its effect, and be precise about the effect (‘makes the reader want to read on’ is not an effect). In a comparison, the same rule has a second half: the two poems must be held in single sentences, connected, not written up as two mini-essays stapled together.

A method for the hour

Read the question and the quotation. What view does the statement offer? Do you agree, partly agree, resist it? Your line of argument is your answer to that.
Choose four poems, two by each. Two pairs, each pair carrying one strand of your argument. See Comparing.
Plan the connections, not just the poems. For each pair, write the one-sentence claim that names the link and the difference.
Introduce with argument and context. Name your poems and your line; place one sharp, relevant piece of context.
Write two-way paragraphs. Claim, Heaney close, Sheers close and connected, so-what.
Conclude by weighing. Return to the argument and decide: how far, in the end, do you agree with the statement?

An annotated model paragraph

On the view that both poets ‘transform a sense of loss into something positive’.

Both poets reach for ritual when a death cannot be spoken, but where Heaney’s ritual consoles, Sheers’s only marks the loss.¹ In ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ Heaney kneels to tend his murdered cousin, turning to find him ‘on your knees / With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes’; the tenderness of the physical care performs the mourning that the poem pointedly refuses to do in anger, so that, as Corcoran argues, the elegy becomes an act of reconciliation rather than accusation.² Sheers, by contrast, ends ‘The Hill Fort’ as a father returns to ‘tip these ashes onto the tongue of the wind’:³ the same impulse to enact grief, yet the wind scatters what Heaney’s plaited rushes had gathered, so Sheers leaves the loss moving but unhealed.⁴

Topic sentence names the connection and the difference inside it. That is a two-way claim.

Short quotation, analysed from detail to effect, with a critic embedded and put to work, not just dropped in.

‘By contrast’ joins the poets inside the same argument, rather than starting a fresh mini-essay on Sheers.

The ‘so what’: the difference is turned back to the question about whether loss is transformed.

Practice questions

These are written in the board’s style for this site; they are not reproduced Eduqas papers.

‘Poetry should transform a sense of loss into something positive.’ Explore connections between the ways Heaney and Sheers write about loss.
‘Poetry about journeys is also about self-discovery.’ Explore connections between the ways they write about journeys.
‘Poets see the world largely in images.’ Explore connections between the ways they use imagery.
‘A poem should make its reader feel they have glimpsed something intimate.’ Explore how they present watching and watchers.

Now write one