Media and Literary Analysis
This domain covers the analysis of non-fictional media (cartoons, advertisements, editorials, blogs, social media posts, film sequences) and of literary texts (poetry, drama, short fiction, novel extracts). The task usually combines description, analysis and interpretation, and at higher level asks you to evaluate how the medium shapes the message.
Medium-specific toolkits
- Cartoon: identify the situation, then the visual rhetoric - caricature, exaggeration, symbol, contrast, scale, caption. Ask who is ridiculed and how the viewer is positioned.
- Advertisement: purpose, target group, visual codes, slogan, layout, and the persuasive move (problem–solution, aspiration, celebrity transfer).
- Film: shot size and angle, camera movement, lighting and colour, diegetic vs non-diegetic sound, editing rhythm, mise-en-scène, performance. Describe only what you interpret.
- Poetry: speaker vs poet, stanza form, metre, rhyme scheme, enjambment, caesura, imagery, volta.
- Drama: scene structure, conflict, aside, soliloquy, dramatic irony, foil.
- Fiction: narrative situation, focalisation, direct and indirect characterisation, setting, symbol and motif.
The order that works
Genre and context → what the text or sequence does → how it does it (features) → what it means → evaluation. Contextualise where the task requires it, for example a Shakespeare scene read against a modern film adaptation.
Worked example
Lines: "The house / keeps its own counsel; the windows / have learned not to ask." Reasoning: the enjambment splits "house" from its predicate, producing hesitation, while "keeps its own counsel" and "learned" personify the building and grant it deliberateness. The effect is secrecy and quiet endurance, which supports a reading of the house as a stand-in for a family that does not speak about its past. The interpretation is the mark-earning step; "personification plus enjambment" alone is not.
Traps that cost marks
- Retelling a film sequence or plot instead of analysing.
- Describing a cartoon without naming its target and stance.
- Confusing speaker and poet, or narrator and author.
- Ignoring the caption, slogan or stage direction - they are part of the text.
- Asserting symbols without textual evidence.
- Treating a film still as if it were a painting, without sound and editing.