Geräte ohne Funktion: Warum eine Stilmittelliste keine Analyse ist
Jonas writes the Leseverstehen und Textanalyse part of a 180-minute Klausur. The material is a 700-word comment piece from a British daily arguing that social media should be banned for under-16s. Three tasks are set: (1) summarise the author's line of argument in paragraphs 1–3 in about 100 words; (2) analyse how the author tries to persuade the reader; (3) comment on the author's proposal, referring to the text and to his own knowledge.
Jonas spends 55 minutes on task 1 and writes 300 words. For task 2 he produces a neat list: "rhetorical question (l. 12), anecdote (ll. 15–18), tricolon (l. 24), irony (l. 31)" - each with a one-line definition copied from his glossary. His teacher's feedback last term read: "You identify devices; you do not analyse." Paragraph 5 begins: "Of course, the platforms will assure us that they care deeply about teenage wellbeing," and continues two sentences later with "But a company that markets to children cannot credibly claim to protect them."
1. Explain why Jonas's list earns only limited credit, and set out what the operator "analyse" actually requires.
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Why the list fails: naming a device and defining it describes the surface of the text. It says nothing about what the device does in this argument, for this reader, at this point. A glossary definition is knowledge the candidate brought with them; the examiner is marking what they did with the text.
What "analyse" requires - a chain, not a label:
- Locate and quote precisely (a short quotation, not just a line number).
- Name the device - briefly, because it is the least valuable part.
- State its function in the argument: the rhetorical question at l. 12 does not merely "engage the reader"; it forces the reader to supply the answer the author wants and thereby makes them complicit in the conclusion.
- State its effect on this readership - parents reading a liberal daily, who are being asked to accept state intervention.
- Link back to the thesis, so the analysis shows how persuasion is structured, not just decorated.
Practical consequence: three devices analysed in depth beat eight listed. Jonas should select the devices that carry the argument - the anecdote that supplies experiential proof statistics cannot, the tricolon that makes the ban sound inevitable - and drop the rest.
2. Design a time plan for the 180 minutes and justify the allocation. What does the word limit in task 1 tell Jonas?
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A defensible plan:
- 20 min: read the text twice, annotate with the three tasks in mind (mark persuasive moves while reading, not afterwards).
- 25 min: task 1, about 100 words plus checking.
- 55–60 min: task 2, the analysis - the most demanding operator.
- 45 min: task 3, comment with text reference and own knowledge.
- 15 min: proofread, check that each task answers its own operator, count words.
Justification: the three tasks are not weighted equally in practice; the analytical and evaluative parts carry the discriminating criteria, and they are what the marking scheme separates candidates on. A summary is a lower-order skill and is capped by its word limit, so time spent beyond it earns nothing.
The 300-word summary is the real error. Task 1 asks for about 100 words: that is a ceiling, not a target. Writing three times the limit costs 30 minutes, produces comprehension errors under time pressure, and signals that Jonas has not understood the function of a summary - compression is the skill being tested. The saved time goes directly into task 2, where the marks actually are.
3. How should Jonas read the "Of course" sentence in paragraph 5, and what goes wrong if he misreads it?
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Reading it correctly: "Of course" is a concessive marker, not agreement. The author grants the counter-position in order to dismiss it, and the "But ..." two sentences later is the rebuttal that carries the real claim: a company marketing to children cannot credibly claim to protect them. The concession therefore strengthens the argument by pre-empting the obvious objection.
The misreading risk: a candidate who stops at "care deeply about teenage wellbeing" may summarise the author as balanced or even sympathetic to the platforms. That single misreading propagates into all three tasks - the summary misstates the line of argument, the analysis misreads the tone as conciliatory, and the comment responds to a position the author does not hold. It is the most expensive kind of error in this section.
Method to avoid it: never determine the function of a sentence in isolation. Read the paragraph's last sentence first, then judge the first. Mark irony signals explicitly - "deeply" as overstatement, "assure us" as a verb that distances the author from the claim. Note in the margin: "concession → rebuttal", which is also usable as a structural point in task 2.