Paper 1: guided literary analysis of unseen texts
Paper 1 is a guided literary analysis of unseen texts: at HL, 2 hours 15 minutes, two texts of different literary forms (typically one poem and one prose passage), each analysed in a separate response. It is worth 35% of the final grade and 20 marks, assessed on understanding and interpretation, analysis and evaluation, focus and organisation, and language.
Core rules
- Read each text twice: once for sense, once with a pen, marking shifts, repetitions, voice, syntax, punctuation and form.
- Write a thesis, not a topic. 'The poem is about grief' fails; 'the poem stages grief as an argument between the elegiac and the colloquial' gives you something to prove.
- Organise by the text's movements, not by a device checklist ('imagery, then rhythm, then tone').
- Quote precisely and briefly, then analyse the wording. Two analysed quotations beat six listed ones.
- Give form equal weight: stanza shape, line breaks, sentence length, narrative perspective, stage space.
- Budget roughly equal time for both texts; a brilliant first response cannot rescue a missing second.
Worked example
An unseen poem runs eight lines of long, heavily subordinated sentences, then a single four-word line: 'The house stayed.' Reasoning: the syntax enacts deferral; the short line's stress falls on 'stayed', and the full stop seals it. The turn is structural, so the best paragraph begins with that shift and reads the closure as ambiguous - comfort or accusation. The device (caesura, end-stop) is named only to explain the effect.
Traps
- Device-hunting without effect.
- Paraphrasing content and calling it interpretation.
- Ignoring form because the meaning seems obvious.
- Writing an introduction about the human condition.
- Running out of time and analysing one text only.