Control of Written Expression
What you must understand
Examiners reward prose that is accurate, varied and controlled. The core requirements are: grammatical accuracy (subject–verb agreement, tense consistency, pronoun reference, complete sentences), cohesion (connectives, referencing, lexical chains that hold a paragraph together), punctuation (commas for clarity, semicolons between related independent clauses, colons introducing explanations or lists, apostrophes for possession and contraction, quotation marks), and spelling of both everyday and analytical vocabulary.
Beyond correctness, aim for register appropriate to an analytical essay: formal but not inflated, precise rather than vague. Avoid conversational filler ("basically", "a lot of"), clichés, and empty intensifiers ("very", "really"). Vary sentence length deliberately: a short sentence after two longer ones creates emphasis. Use nominalisation sparingly - it can sound abstract. Keep tense consistent: use present tense when discussing what a text does.
Traps in questions
- Comma splices. Two independent clauses need a full stop, semicolon or conjunction.
- Apostrophe errors. "Its" is possessive; "it's" means "it is". "The character's motive" (one) versus "the characters' motives" (many).
- Misplaced quotation punctuation. Full stops generally sit outside a short embedded quotation; block quotations are punctuated differently.
- Dangling modifiers. "Having read the novel, the ending surprised me" attributes the reading to the ending.
- Tense drift. Slipping from present to past mid-paragraph when analysing the same text.
Rule of thumb
Proofread in a targeted way rather than re-reading for general sense: one pass checking only sentence boundaries, one checking only apostrophes and quotation marks, one checking verb tense. This catches errors that fluent reading skips over.