Paper 1 Text Analysis: close reading of unseen texts
Paper 1 Text Analysis asks you to read unseen texts closely and explain how they work: who produced them, for whom, in what form, and by what linguistic means they achieve their effects. Questions are directed - they tell you what to look at, so answering the exact wording is the first mark-earning decision. Texts are drawn from different genres and periods, so a nineteenth-century travel memoir, a charity leaflet and a modern online review can all appear.
Establish context before analysing
Work out text type and its conventions, purpose, audience, mode and register (Halliday's field, tenor, mode). Ask what a reader of that genre expects, then note where the writer meets or deliberately breaks that expectation: a charity appeal that opens with a joke is doing something calculated.
Analyse, don't label
Every point needs feature, quotation, effect and reason: name the device, quote briefly, state what it makes the reader think or feel, and explain why the writer chose it there. Prefer precise terms - semantic field, modality, passive voice, tricolon, graphological features such as italics or bullet points - over vague words like 'effective'.
Worked example
Extract: 'You did not ask for a crisis. You did not ask for a food bank. You did ask for help.' Model comment: 'The anaphoric repetition of 'You did not ask' places the reader inside the situation, while the parallel third sentence flips the negation into a permission - 'You did ask for help' - making the request to donate feel like the reader's own conclusion rather than a demand.' Reasoning: two named features (anaphora, parallelism), short quotations, an effect on the reader (identification without guilt), and a purpose-linked reason (persuading to donate). That four-part shape turns a feature list into analysis.
Traps
- Narrative summary or paraphrase instead of analysis.
- Naming a feature wrongly: an adverb labelled an adjective, a simile labelled a metaphor. Wrong metalanguage costs more than it earns.
- Ignoring structure: paragraph order, shifts in focus, endings and graphology are as examinable as lexis.
- Quoting a whole sentence when three words prove the point.
- Unbalanced coverage: the second text or second question gets half a paragraph.
Marks come from accuracy and explanation, not from the number of devices named.