AS LL - A WORKED PARAGRAPH - SPIES

Here is the paragraph we put together in class on Thursday morning. Remember that in the exam you only need to refer to one or two language or literary features. Our focus should be on the comments.

One way the story develops is where Stephen tells us that things have changed. We can see that after the thermos incident in chapter 7, Stephen realises that the situation has become serious. He says ‘The games not over. It’s simply become a more terrible kind of game.’

Here are five bullet points that you could include to complete this paragraph. In an exam I expect you could refer to two or three points at most.

·         The short simple declarative sentence at the beginning has been used to emphasis the significance of the events taking place

·         The narrator is the young Stephen and this helps create tension. Words like ‘become’ are spoken in the present tense.

·         ‘More terrible’ is a superlative adjective. It helps present the situation as sinister and dangerous

·         The lexical choice of the concrete noun 'game' reminds us that Stephen is a child and that no matter how serious the situation becomes, we have a sense of it only being on the status of game - part of his childhood experience.

·         The whole quotation sets up a pattern of escalation. One way this is achieved is by the repetition of the noun 'game'. The first reference there are no modifiers but the second time the noun is modified with two premodifiers ''more terrible'.