Technical Accuracy for Essays

Your risk depends on your choice

This section marks how you write as well as what you say, and it is the only part of your Literature course where that is true apart from the Shakespeare essay. What almost nobody is told is that the mistakes you are likely to make are not random. They follow from the question you picked. If you chose the extract question, your answer will be thick with short quotations, and the place your accuracy will fail is the seam where a quotation joins your own sentence. If you chose the discursive question, you are ranging across a whole novel from memory, and your accuracy will fail in long sentences that try to carry three pieces of the story at once and lose their grip halfway. Same assessment objective, two different ways of falling over. Knowing which one is yours is most of the work. Every example here comes from an invented novel called The Weir House, so nothing depends on which book your school teaches.

Only two answers carry it

Technical accuracy is worth five per cent of your whole Literature grade, and it is not spread evenly. It is assessed on exactly two answers: this one, on 19th-century prose, and the Shakespeare essay in the other component. Two and a half per cent each. It is not assessed on modern prose or drama, and not on poetry. That is worth knowing because it changes what you do with your last few minutes rather than what you revise. In a paper carrying several essays, the proofreading time is not shared out equally: it belongs to the sections that pay for it. If you have five minutes left and two answers you could reread, reread this one. Other boards do this differently, so advice you find online may not apply to you.

Two answers, two ways to slip

The same marks, earned in different prose. Find yourself in the column that matches the question you tend to choose.

Which risk is highest

A student has chosen the discursive question and is writing a paragraph that moves between three separate points in the novel. Which technical accuracy risk should they watch hardest?

• A sentence growing so long that it loses track of its own subject and verb
• Punctuating embedded quotations wrongly
• Misspelling ordinary everyday words
• Forgetting to start a new paragraph

Match the quotation problem

Find the broken quotation

These four sentences are from student essays about the invented novel The Weir House. Select the ONE in which the quotation has been embedded so that the sentence no longer makes grammatical sense.

• The narrator describes the hall as "colder than the yard", which makes the house feel hostile.
• Ellen is said to have "waited without expecting anything", and the phrase suggests exhaustion rather than patience.
• The house was "stood empty for a winter" before anyone returned to it.
• Calling the river "a neighbour who had moved away" turns the loss into something personal.

Fitting a quotation in

Four ways of joining a quotation to your own sentence. Each is correct in a different situation, and having more than one available is itself part of what AO4 rewards.

The rule in a sentence

A quotation that continues your sentence grammatically needs _____ before it. A reporting phrase that could stand before speech takes _____. A sentence that builds up to the quotation can take _____. If you have shortened a quotation, show it with _____. And if the sentence no longer _____ once the quotation is in, the fix is to rewrite your own words rather than the quotation.

Assemble the quotation

Assemble a sentence that embeds a quotation cleanly and then does something with it.

Which two are punctuated correctly

Select the TWO sentences that are technically correct.

• Ellen is described as "waiting without expecting anything", which turns her patience into exhaustion.
• One phrase carries the whole idea: "a house that had outlived its river".
• The narrator describes, "the hall as colder than the yard".
• Ellen "was waited without expecting anything," and this shows exhaustion.

Range doing the work

AO4 asks for a range of vocabulary and sentence structures used for clarity, purpose and effect, and only then for accurate spelling and punctuation. Read that order again. Range comes first. A student who writes forty short correct sentences has met the accuracy half and missed the other one entirely. But range is not decoration, and long sentences are not the goal. Watch what these do. A short sentence lands a claim: the house is the novel's real antagonist. A longer one holds a comparison together: where the river once gave the family its living, it now gives them only the sound of something leaving. A short one again turns the screw: nothing in the book recovers from that. Three sentence shapes, each chosen because the thought had that shape. That is what range means here, and it is why you cannot bolt it on at the end. If your paragraph is all one length, the fix is not to make some sentences longer; it is to notice which of your claims are simple and let them be said simply.

The order to proofread in

You have four minutes left and this is one of the two answers that carries technical accuracy marks. Put the checks in the order that finds most errors first.

• Find any sentence you cannot read aloud in one breath, and split it
• Check every quotation joins its sentence and still lets it make sense
• Check full stops and commas sit outside the quotation marks unless they belong to the quotation
• Check the spelling of the character and place names you have used most
• Read your first and last sentences and make sure each says something

Where the sentence loses control

This student is writing a discursive answer and one sentence has run away. Select the ONE sentence that has lost its grammatical control.

• The house dominates the novel from the opening chapter onwards.
• Although Ellen leaves twice, she returns both times, and each return is described more briefly than the last.
• When Ellen first arrives at the house, and later after the flood when the family have gone and she comes back alone in the second winter, which the narrator describes very differently, and the river having changed course by then as well.
• By the final chapter the river is mentioned only once, and its absence is the point.

The final five minutes

You are in the exam. Take the decisions in order.

• You have five minutes left and two answers you could reread: this one and the modern drama essay. Which do you choose?
• You chose the extract question. What do you look at first?
• You find a quotation you are no longer sure you have remembered exactly. What is the safest fix?
• You notice every sentence in one paragraph is about the same length. What should you do?

Redraft your own paragraph

Find a paragraph you have already written about your own 19th-century novel. Redraft it, then explain in writing what you changed and why.

• Say which question type you tend to choose, and which of the two risk patterns is therefore yours
• Quote one sentence from your original paragraph that you have changed
• Explain what was technically wrong with it, or what it failed to do
• Give the redrafted version
• Explain one place where you changed sentence length deliberately, and what the new shape does
• Name the two answers in this qualification where technical accuracy is assessed, and say how that changes your last five minutes