Respond critically to significant connections across texts, supported by evidence (AS 91478)
Domain: Respond critically to significant connections across texts, supported by evidence - AS 91478, internal, 4 credits. You select texts and a connecting thread, then argue what the connection reveals. Your programme will specify how many texts and which combinations; evidence must come from each text discussed.
What makes a connection significant
A connection is a claim, not a category. 'Both texts are about family' is a topic. 'Both texts use an absent mother to interrogate national identity, but one treats absence as grief and the other as political erasure' is an argument. Strong threads include repeated ideas treated differently, comparable authorial purposes, recurring symbols, contrasting perspectives on the same event, or genre conventions used to different ends.
Structure
- Open with the connection stated as a thesis.
- Organise by point of connection, not text-by-text; each paragraph should move between texts.
- Compare and contrast: acknowledge where the texts diverge, and explain why - medium, context, purpose, audience.
- Conclude by saying what the comparison lets a reader see that one text alone could not.
Worked example
Thread: the figure of the missing mother in a novel and a film. Paragraph claim: both texts make the mother's absence the site of national anxiety. Evidence: the novel voices the absence through an unreliable first-person narrator; the film shows it through empty frames and withheld sound. Reasoning: the differences are the point - interior narration against visual withholding - so the argument explains how each medium shapes the same idea, rather than claiming the texts are simply similar.
Traps
Superficial links; retelling each text in turn; evidence from one text only; ignoring differences; choosing texts too alike to argue anything.