Extract Explorer: The Novel

Working the extract itself

You already know how to decide between the extract question and the discursive one, and how to link an extract outward to the rest of the novel. This module is about the part in between: **actually working the passage in front of you.** Three things it covers: - **How to read an extract** before you write anything - **What is worth marking**, and what is not - **How one marked detail becomes one paragraph** of analysis ⚠️ **The examples use the opening of Dickens's A Christmas Carol**, which is one of the six novels on this specification and is out of copyright, so it can be printed in full here. **Your novel may be a different one. The method is what transfers**, and it transfers completely.

More than you can use

Here is the difficulty nobody warns you about. **An extract of thirty lines contains far more than a forty-mark answer can discuss.** You are not short of material. You have too much. **So the real skill is selection, and selection needs a criterion.** Without one you mark whatever catches your eye, then write about the first four things you marked, and the result is a list of observations with no argument holding them together. **The criterion is the question.** Read it before you read the extract, and it tells you what counts as interesting in this passage on this occasion. A detail can be genuinely striking and still be **the wrong detail for this question**. Leaving it out is not waste; it is what makes room for the details that answer what was asked. **Deciding what not to write about is a skill, and it is the one that separates a focused answer from a full one.**

How to read it

Put these steps into the order that produces a focused answer.

• Read the QUESTION first, so you know what you are looking for before you look
• Read the extract straight through once, for sense, marking nothing
• Read it again, marking only what bears on the question
• Choose three or four of your marks - the ones you can say most about - and discard the rest
• Write, giving each chosen detail its own paragraph

What comes first?

You turn to the extract question. What should you do before anything else?

• Read the question, so that when you read the extract you already know what counts as relevant
• Read the extract carefully, annotating as you go
• Write a full plan of the answer
• Recall the context of the novel

Five things worth marking

When you do annotate, these five repay attention in nineteenth-century prose. Each is a question as much as a feature.

Match each feature to its question

Annotate for the question

The opening of A Christmas Carol. The question is: **how does Dickens establish the narrator's voice?** Tap the TWO details that bear on THAT question, not simply the two most striking phrases.

• "Marley was dead: to begin with.
• There is no doubt whatever about that
• . The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and
• the chief mourner"
• - a list of officials assembled to certify a single fact.

Who is telling you this?

From that opening, select the TWO things a strong answer could say about the narrator.

• He insists on the fact rather than simply reporting it, telling the reader directly that there is no doubt about it
• He piles up officials as though supplying legal proof, which makes the insistence sound like a case being established rather than a story being begun
• He keeps himself entirely out of the narration
• He is unreliable and cannot be trusted

Marking everything, marking for a reason

The same extract, annotated by two students. Both worked hard; only one can write a focused answer from what they have.

Reading an extract

The first thing to read is the _____, because it tells you what counts as relevant in this passage. Then read the extract straight through _____, marking nothing. On the second pass, mark only what bears on the question, then _____ three or four of those marks and discard the rest. Features worth watching for include the narrative _____, the point where the passage _____, and any word or image that appears more than once, which is called _____.

Build the analytical sentence

One marked detail, one sentence. Build the shape that gets from what is there to what it does.

A paragraph from one detail

**One marked detail, worked into one paragraph.** The detail: the list of four officials who signed the burial register. "Dickens establishes his narrator through insistence rather than description. The opening states that Marley was dead and then adds, directly to the reader, that there is no doubt whatever about it - a reassurance nobody has yet asked for, which makes the narrator audible from the second sentence. **The list that follows does the same work by other means.** Naming the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner supplies a single ordinary fact with the apparatus of legal proof, as though a death required certification. The effect is a narrator building a case, and a reader who wonders why a case is needed at all - **which is exactly the question the rest of the book will answer." **Look at the shape, because it works for any extract.** Name what is there. Say what it does. Say what that means for how the passage reads. **One detail, three moves, one paragraph** - and three paragraphs like that are worth far more than eight observations in a row.

Which detail do you use?

You have marked six details. Two are equally striking, but the question asks about the NARRATOR. Which do you choose?

• The one that bears on the narrator, even if the other is the more interesting piece of writing
• The more striking one, since it will give you more to say
• Both, to be safe
• Whichever appears first in the extract

An extract in the exam

The extract question is printed in front of you. Work through the first ten minutes.

• You read the extract and find it dense and difficult on the first pass. What do you do?
• You have marked nine details. How many do you write about?
• Halfway through you notice a detail you had not marked, and it is a good one. What do you do?

Your turn: work an extract

Take a page from your own set novel and work it as though it were an exam extract.

• Write a question of your own about the passage, naming a specific focus such as the narrator, a character or the atmosphere
• Mark the passage against that question and list the details you marked
• Choose three of them, and for each say in one sentence why it bears on your question
• Write one full paragraph on ONE of the three, using the shape: name what is there, say what it does, say what that means