EXAM SKILLS
The sense of an opening
Luke McBratney offers tips and advice for crafting a high-scoring, purposeful opening to your essay
The adage ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’ holds true for essays as much as it does for social introductions. For today’s English literature A-levels, it is truer than ever, particularly in the case of longer discursive tasks where you respond to a viewpoint or a relatively open question. A good opening is not just a well-phrased start that wins the interest of your reader/examiner and leads to your main material — it is an integral part of an assured and sophisticated argument. So where does such an opening come from? Don’t worry — it doesn’t depend on a random moment of inspiration. A good opening, like a good essay, grows from a good plan.
Planning and starting
High-performing students take planning seriously. A quarter of their time is spent reading, thinking and planning. And planning is a systematic process.
1 Study the question carefully
Initially, you’ll underline keywords, consider aspects that you might agree or disagree with, think about words that you might ‘grapple’ with — that is, those words that might be ‘unpacked’ further or whose connotations and complexities might be explored. This will mean you can come back to your underlined and annotated question as you plan.
2 Generate ideas
There are many ways in which you can generate ideas, but a structured approach often works best, especially if the question is relatively open, such as one from the comparative question on the novel and anthology for AQA (A)’s ‘Love through the ages’ exam, or one of OCR’s second questions in the ‘Comparative and contextual study’ exam. The idea is to maximise the number of relevant ideas you can produce. Here is one such approach — spend a minute or so on each stage before moving on to the next:
■ free planning — jot ideas in response to the question as they come to you
■ characterisation — which characters might be relevant to the topic, theme or idea identified in the question and how does the author/do the authors use them?
■ themes/ideas — which of the text’s/texts’ themes or ideas might be relevant and how?
■ key moments — are there important parts of the text/texts which are relevant to the question and/or your response? (You should have revised such parts thoroughly if the text is a novel. If it is a volume of verse, then you should think of poems that are particularly relevant.)
■ methods — which authorial methods might be particularly relevant? How can you explore them in your response?
3 Select your best and most relevant ideas
These will be the most useful ideas to help you articulate a coherent and sophisticated argument.
4 Shape these points into a structured plan
This final set of planning notes is the blueprint of your essay. Your points are now ordered in a logical sequence. Since you know the main thrust of your argument, include this (in note form) as the first section of your structured plan.
The opening paragraph
Having planned thoroughly, it is relatively easy for you to write up your answer. Even so, there are things to bear in mind. The opening paragraph should engage the question directly. It should act as either a short answer to the question, or it should signpost the central planks of your argument at the outset. These are important functions, as they help the examiner determine the essay’s level of achievement. For an essay to be in the top band, not only should the expression be fluent and in an academic register, it must be well constructed and have a clear and logical argument. Exam boards use terms like ‘well-structured, coherent and detailed argument consistently developed’ (OCR) and ‘perceptive, assured and sophisticated argument in relation to the task’ (AQA). A strong opening paragraph helps to persuade the examiner that your work meets these requirements.
In addition, your opening should engage with the big picture, responding to the big ideas suggested by the question rather than beginning with dense analytical detail. While it must always provide a sense of introduction to help the reader/ examiner understand and engage with your argument, its exact contents will be slightly different according to the nature of the task and the question posed. Consider the following questions and openings.
Responding to a viewpoint
Example question
‘Poets are at their most moving and engaging when they write about politics rather than simply their personal experiences.’ In response to this view, explore connections between the ways in which Heaney and Sheers write about history. Analyse at least two poems in detail from each set text. (WJEC-style)
Student’s introduction
While Sheers’ poems might be categorised as either personal or political, Heaney’s blend these elements to such an extent that it is difficult to separate the two. And for both, the use of personal experience is rarely just simple. The more we study the personal and the political in the poems, the more complex and interesting the poems become. For example, Heaney’s ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ both memorialises a dead relation and documents an atrocity of the Troubles and ‘The Toome Road’ offers a personal response to a political event — the deployment of the British army to Northern Ireland. For this reason, it is easy to partly agree with, yet partly contest the quoted view. Heaney’s poetry does engage and move the reader but not only when it engages with the political. It is also moving and engaging when it explores subject matter that is simultaneously political and personal. We can contest the question further when we consider Sheers’ poems. In the main, Sheers’ poems drawn from personal experience — those springing from family relationships and romantic relationships — are, by contrast to Heaney’s, much more moving than those to do with politics. Poems, such as ‘Flag’, written at the time of the Welsh referendum on devolution, seek to stimulate political thought rather than to move emotions. Yet there are notable exceptions. Some poems that draw on history, significantly ‘Y Gaer’ and ‘The Hill Fort’, are moving and, like many of Heaney’s poems, are both personal and historical.
Commentary
The question is comparative with several components to the viewpoint that students are asked to consider. Yet rather than being daunted by this complexity, the student responds to the main idea of the viewpoint and to its elements directly. The question acts as a filter for the student, allowing them to focus on an area of their studies and enabling them to show off their skills and understanding by giving them words and phrases to provoke a response.
Note how this opening paragraph engages closely with the terms of the question and responds to the task set directly. It functions as a kind of condensed answer that the main body of the essay will develop. While there is no overt signposting, the reader is given the impression that poems such as ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ and ‘Flag’ will be analysed in greater depth as the argument progresses. The keywords in this example have been emboldened, which helps you to see just how frequently they are used by the student. This is not a trick. By using keywords and related words, the student is able to respond with precision. Such words enable the student to ‘grapple’ with the terms of the question and introduce the ideas that are important to their argument.
Beware, though, of the empty repetition of keywords that simply parrots back bits of the question to the examiner. Using the keywords without real engagement is not the same as setting up an argument — it won’t fool an examiner into thinking the opening is any better than straightforward. The opening paragraph above, by contrast, is assured — and in more ways than its expression and promise of coherent argument. For this task, context is also assessed and the brief mentions of political events are well integrated and suggest that the main body of the essay is going to be informed by contextual understanding.
Note how the student avoids becoming bogged down in details in this introduction — the ideas are very much at the level of the big picture. The sense of personal and political being mutually exclusive is questioned and the reader/examiner has a strong sense that the student is thinking through the implications of the viewpoint and considering the ways in which it might oversimplify the poetry.
Comparison is a further strength, and some of the main phrases that signal comparison or contrast have been underlined so that you can see the truly comparative nature of this introduction easily.
Other question types
While the principles of crafting clear and purposeful plans and openings to essays remain the same for all answers, different question styles require adjustments to the approach outlined above. These include questions that invite you to comment on an unseen text or texts and those that invite you to comment on an extract from a set text, such as a Shakespeare play. In each case, be sure to comment on all parts of the question, and if the question has an extract from a set text, while you plan and formulate your argument, it would be helpful to consider the part of the text from which it comes and its importance in the text as a whole. Let’s take one final example. Here, the task is comprised not of a viewpoint and an instruction, but of an open question.
Responding to an open question
Example question
‘Compare the ways in which love’s ambiguities are presented in two texts you have studied.’ (AQA A-style)
Student’s introduction
In the main, the love poems explore the ambiguities of love directly, with speakers laying bare the ambiguity of their feelings openly, whereas in Atonement feelings of love are not only ambiguous in themselves but also in the way that they are communicated by the novel. With the poems, the reader usually feels the intensity of love’s ambiguous feelings through the lyric form which encourages them to identify with the speaker, whereas McEwan’s postmodern novel has formal ambiguities that distance the reader from the characters. Indeed, by the end of the novel, the reader is never fully sure if the ambiguous feelings of love are those of the characters, or if they are at least partly the invention of Briony.
Commentary
To answer such a question, you need to identify which kinds of ambiguities are explored in your texts and what is interesting about these ambiguities, and be able to articulate your own argument — your own slant — on how these ambiguities can be compared. Rather than respond to an agenda in the form of a quoted critical view, you have to set the agenda yourself.
Note how the opening makes judgements on the types of ambiguity to be compared, and note how it begins with the big picture rather than the details. There is plenty of time to develop the argument through detailed examples and close analysis of authorial methods in the essay’s main body. For now, the main task is to set up an argument. This has been done and in a way that engages the reader/examiner, making them curious about how the argument is going to develop and eager to read on. Remember too that a strong opening need not be lengthy — indeed, some tasks lend themselves to an introduction of elegant economy. Whatever the task, ensure that your opening fulfils its two major functions: addressing the question and introducing your argument.
Final thoughts
Remember that a good introduction grows from a good plan and that a good plan comes from thorough engagement with the question. If you spend 25% of the available time reading, thinking and planning and if you generate ideas systematically, you can maximise your ability to formulate a sophisticated and well-structured argument. When writing essays under exam conditions, it is not impossible to recover from a shaky start, but it is much easier to keep on impressing your reader/ examiner if you made a good first impression.