QCAA English & Literature Extension cheat sheet

Analytical essay structure: thesis (contestable claim about meaning), signposted body paragraphs, each built on a claim-evidence-analysis link, and a conclusion that extends rather than repeats the thesis.

Evidence hierarchy: direct quotation with page or line reference > close paraphrase with reference > generalised reference to the text. Unreferenced assertion carries no analytical weight.

Close reading procedure: select a short passage, identify the dominant technique, name its precise effect on a reader or audience, then link that effect to the text's broader concerns.

Technique vocabulary must be precise: metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, juxtaposition, motif, symbolism, dramatic irony, verbal irony, hyperbole, understatement, allusion, intertextuality.

Metalanguage for form: narrative voice (first, second, third limited, third omniscient), focalisation, free indirect discourse, frame narrative, stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator.

Metalanguage for drama and film: stage directions, soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, mise-en-scène, shot scale, montage, chiaroscuro lighting.

Context is used as evidence of production or reception (historical, social, ideological), never as a substitute for textual evidence; every contextual claim must be tied back to a specific textual feature.

A strong analytical paragraph answers: what is claimed, where in the text it is shown, how the technique produces that meaning, and why that meaning matters to the text's argument or theme.

Comparative response requires a shared conceptual frame (a theme, question or problem), not parallel summaries; every comparison must name a point of similarity or difference and explain its significance.

Comparison connectives do the analytical work: 'whereas', 'similarly', 'by contrast', 'both texts construct', 'unlike X, Y reframes'. Bare juxtaposition without a connective is description.

Theoretical lenses for Unit 4 include psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, ecocritical, reader-response and queer readings; a lens is a set of questions applied to evidence, not a label pasted on a text.

Each lens supplies a distinctive analytical question: feminist readings ask how gender is constructed and whose gaze organises the text; Marxist readings ask how class and economic relations shape representation.

Independent inquiry requires a research question that is arguable, text-anchored and answerable within the word limit; a question answerable by summary ('what happens in the novel') is not researchable.

Source evaluation criteria: authority of the author, currency of publication, relevance to the stated question, and the presence of verifiable evidence; secondary criticism is cited to be contested or extended, not merely quoted.

Referencing convention for the subject is a consistent author-date system with page numbers for direct quotation; a reference list includes only sources cited in the response.

Reflexive practice: the response acknowledges the assumptions of its chosen lens, so the reading is presented as one defensible interpretation among others rather than as the text's single meaning.