Using a source accurately in an analytical response
A student is writing an analytical response about a prescribed Tamil short story. She wants to claim that the protagonist's silence at the end shows defeat. She has one quotation: a line where the protagonist says nothing but the narrator notes the sounds of the street continuing. She also recalls, without a page reference, a critic's comment that the story is about resilience. In her draft she writes: "The critic says the story is about resilience, which proves the ending is about defeat." The response must be 400–500 words and must use textual evidence. She has 25 minutes left and has written 180 words.
1. Identify the reasoning error in her draft sentence and explain how to repair it.
Read the worked answer
The error is a contradiction presented as support. The critic's comment (resilience) and the student's claim (defeat) point in opposite directions, so citing the critic cannot prove the claim; at best it sets up a tension the student must argue through.
Repair options:
- Reframe the claim so the critic supports it: argue that the silence is ambiguous, and that the continuing street sounds leave open a resilience reading that the surface appears to deny.
- Reframe the critic as a counterview: state the resilience reading, then argue from the text why defeat is the better reading, and concede what the resilience reading explains.
Either repair requires a page reference or precise location for the critic's comment. If she cannot supply one, she should drop the critic and argue from the text alone, because an unlocatable secondary claim weakens rather than strengthens the response.
The underlying rule: secondary sources must be consistent with the claim or explicitly argued against, never merely appended.
2. She has 180 words written and 25 minutes left for a 400–500 word response. What should she do with the remaining time, and how should she use the quotation?
Read the worked answer
She needs roughly 220–320 more words in 25 minutes, which is comfortable if she plans for two minutes first rather than writing immediately.
Plan:
- 2 minutes: decide the repaired claim and the role of the critic.
- 15 minutes: write the body - the quotation analysis, the counterview, and the resolution.
- 5 minutes: write the conclusion and check the word count.
- 3 minutes: verify the quotation is accurate and located.
Using the quotation: the narrator's note that street sounds continue is the strongest evidence she has, and it should be analysed, not summarised. The move is to ask what the continuing sound does: it denies the silence total significance, which complicates a pure-defeat reading. She should quote the phrase precisely, then state what it implies, then connect it to her claim.
She should not pad to reach 400 words; a tight 420-word response with analysed evidence scores better than a padded 500.