KEY ESSAY WRITING SKILLS
Analysing language, form and structure (part 4)
creating a quotation explosion
This is part 4 of our 4-part series on analysing language, form and structure methods. This is for GCSE students and above. It explains an advanced version of the core skill that builds on the first 3 parts of this series, plus two other skills: writing about big ideas and writing about the context of a text. If you’re not sure how to do either of these things, please read these guides first.
Contents of this guide
Quick links for this skill
What it means to create a quotation explosion
This is key for getting the higher grades (8-9) at GCSE. It is something that AQA, the exam board we use, seem especially fond of, which is why we’ve given it a separate guide, rather than lumping it in with the general guides to analysing language, form and structure (AO2 at GCSE).
Essentially, creating a quotation explosion is just analysing a single bit of evidence in a huge amount of detail, identifying multiple techniques and analysing each of them in a concise but detailed and synthesised way. That’s it. You just explode the quotation out into its component parts, hence the name we’ve given it, and then analyse each part.
How to create a quotation explosion
Writing advanced analysis of language, form and structure is all about saying a lot about a little. This is something the exam board talk about all the time in their advice to teachers. They want students to take something small from the text and go deep and say a lot about it. You will see this clearly in the examples that follow. The 4-step process itself is fairly straightforward, though Step 4 is quite difficult to do well, as we will see.
Choose your evidence carefully: start with a longer quotation – a sentence or two – which is relevant to the question you’re answering and, crucially, very meaningful in terms of methods (see the separate guide to choosing the right evidence if you’re not sure what this means). There must be lots of meaning in the quotation because that will be what you analyse.
Choose the key words or phrases which you can analyse in depth for AO2. You’ll need to identify several language, form and structure methods in your evidence, though these could just be word classes for individual words. However, it is essential that you zoom in to multiple words and phrases in the quotation. That’s the essence of the quotation explosion.
Write your evidence sentence, embedding all the key words and phrases you identified in Step 2 into the context-setting sentence (see the separate guide to embedding evidence if you’re not sure what this means).
Analyse all the sections you have quoted in a concise but specific way, systematically working through all the methods you have identified, with terminology. You need to link all of your analysis together and, ultimately, back to your paragraph point. You should also try to link your analysis to big ideas, and, where relevant, to the context of the text and to the writer’s purpose. This isn’t easy, but you should be familiar with doing each of these things in isolation by now; the trick here is doing them all together. That’s what this skill is all about.
And that’s it. Obviously, this analysis will form a part of the larger whole of a paragraph (so will need to come after your paragraph point), and, in turn, the larger whole of an entire essay (so will need to be linked to your thesis), but by itself it’s not that complicated to understand, it’s just not easy to do. Let’s look at some examples.
Example 1
The first two examples in this guide are based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We’ve used this text as it’s the first text you’ll study at GCSE and because this kind of methods analysis is something we expect only from GCSE students. Hopefully, by the time you read this guide, you’ll have studied this text, at least a bit, so the examples will make some sense to you. Even if you haven’t, you should be able to understand the concept of the quotation explosion by looking at these examples.
Let’s work through the 4 steps outlined above one at a time:
(1) First, you need to choose a meaningful quotation to analyse. When you study texts in class, you’ll encounter lots of quotations like this in your lessons. In this first example we will work with the quotation below from Stave 1 when Scrooge meets Marley’s ghost:
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
(2) Once you’ve got the quotation you need to choose the bits of it that are most meaningful - the parts that contain methods or which link to big ideas in the text. We are going to use the following underlined parts for this example:
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Here are some techniques we could analyse in the underlined sections of the quotation. We are going to analyse pretty much all of these in this example:
The verb ‘cry’ – suggests outrage, passion – emphasised by the exclamation marks
The repetition of “my business” – emphasises the ambiguity of this phrase – that the ‘work’ meaning of “business” is incomplete – also emphasises just how many things he should have been concerned about (the other meaning of “my business”)
The listing of abstract nouns – linking to Christian virtues – listing emphasises the abundance of them – you could also zoom in to specific words and their meaning, including how they link to the message of the novel (e.g. charity)
The metaphor of an ocean vs. a drop of water to emphasise the insignificance of money in the meaning of a human life
As we said earlier, by the time you read this guide you should be familiar with analysing these kinds of methods. The only difference here is that we’re going to analyse all of them at once, rather than just picking one method and analysing that.
(3) Before you get to the analysis part, you need to write the evidence sentence for your quotation. The key thing here is to quote all the parts you want to analyse (the bits underlined above) and to include those (and only those) in your regular context-setting sentence. This is what the evidence part of our paragraph might look like:
When Scrooge tells Marley he was a good man of business, Marley responds with a “cr[y]”: “Business!” he says, before claiming that “Mankind was [his] business” and that “charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence” were all his business and that, in fact, his work was “but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of [his] business!”
Notice that the quotations are all put into context in a single, long evidence sentence, which explains when this happens in the text and what is going on at the time. If any of that is unfamiliar to you (e.g. the bits in square brackets), check the guide to embedding evidence. Now, let’s write the analysis.
(4) In the box below is an example of a quotation explosion of the evidence we’ve looked at. We’ve included the evidence sentence again (in italics) just to give you a clearer sense of the proportion of evidence to analysis. You should be able to see that the analysis dwarfs the evidence. This is essential. You are saying a lot (the analysis) about a little (the evidence). Notice too that the analysis explains the meaning added by the methods, whilst making links to big ideas and also to the context of the text (e.g. Christian virtues). This example was written by an SHSG student.
Quotation explosion example 1
When Scrooge tells Marley he was a good man of business, Marley responds with a “cr[y]”: “Business!” he says, before claiming that “Mankind was [his] business” and that “charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence” were all his business and that, in fact, his work was “but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of [his] business!” Here Dickens repeats the phrase “my business” because of its double-meaning: the obvious financial connotations linking to industry, but also to refer to things that should concern us. Marley repeats this noun throughout his speech to contrast the two kinds of moral values; his, which revolve around the common welfare of humanity, and Scrooge’s, which revolve around money. This also emphasises Marley’s frustration at narrow-minded men like Scrooge, who only count their expenses as important value in their lives, a frustration that is further emphasised by the passionate tone implied by the verb ‘cry’ and the repeated exclamation marks, which convey Marley’s enthusiasm for his message. If finance is the only thing you are concerned about, Dickens has Marley argue in this section, then you are only scratching the surface of your “comprehensive business.” This is also conveyed by the metaphor of finance being only “a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of [Scrooge’s] business.” A drop in a huge ocean is only a minuscule, completely insignificant part of the entire body; in fact, if you remove it, it would be completely unnoticeable and inconsequential. Marley is arguing that revolving your life around business, in economic terms, is an almost pointless and pathetic way of living, due to how completely worthless it is compared to the rest of life. Instead, Dickens has Marley argue that what should concern you is showing “charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence” towards others. Dickens uses listing here, of Christian virtues that Scrooge is missing, and specifically these virtues relate to being merciful to those less fortunate than you, those who would be seen as “below” you in the social hierarchy of the 19th century, when ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written. These are seen as Christian values, as mercy towards the poor is heavily preached in the bible; this could possibly be used to appeal to the audience’s awareness of Christian morality and to remind them that being only concerned with money will not only lead to an inconsequential life, but goes against the inherent values of Christianity. (Lucy Agguini, Year 11)
Example 2
(1) Now we’ll look at another example based on A Christmas Carol, using a different highly meaningful quotation. This one also comes from Stave 1 when Fred visits Scrooge in his office:
“I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time … as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
(2) As with the previous example, we now need to choose the bits of this quotation that are most meaningful - the parts that contain language or form techniques, or which link to key ideas or key contextual factors in the text. We are going to use the following parts for this example:
“I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time … as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
Here are some methods we could analyse in the underlined sections of the quotation:
The listing of adjectives - emphasises just how many different positive ideas are represented by Christmas; we could also zoom in to specific words like ‘forgiving’ or ‘kind’ and link them to the ideas in the text
The metaphor about opening shut up hearts - could link to ideas of openness, togetherness, compare with oysters, which were references earlier in the text
The adverb ‘freely’ - emphasising the fact it is a choice people make; they want to do this
The metaphor about being fellow-passengers – railway imagery - the idea of life as something transitory - a journey towards something else (death and the afterlife)
The noun ‘creatures’ - conveying the way the rich see the poor as less than human
(3) As before, we need to write the evidence sentence next. You will see that all the parts that are going to be analysed are quoted, and the rest of the sentence is context. This is standard stuff for writing evidence sentences:
When Scrooge is adamant that Christmas is ‘humbug’ in Stave 1, Fred replies with his view of Christmas being a “kind, forgiving, charitable time” when people “open their shut-up hearts freely” and think of the poor like they are “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures”.
Now, onto the analysis.
(4) As with the previous example, this was written by an SHSG student, and we’ve included the evidence sentence again (in italics) to give you a clear sense of the proportion of evidence to analysis (a lot about a little). Notice that, as with the previous example, links are made to big ideas as well as to the context of the text (e.g. The Poor Law).
Quotation explosion example 2
When Scrooge is adamant that Christmas is ‘humbug’ in Stave 1, Fred replies with his view of Christmas being a “kind, forgiving, charitable time” when people “open their shut-up hearts freely” and think of the poor like they are “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures”. The use of the list, ‘kind, forgiving, charitable time’, emphasises just how good of a time Christmas is - or should be. These adjectives are also very admirable character traits, even virtues, that everyone should wish to have. This is an attempt, by Dickens, to convince the reader (the wealthier upper- and upper-middle classes) of being ‘kind’, ‘forgiving’ and ‘charitable’ all throughout the year in order to be classed as good human beings. This is because many people act this way solely at Christmas. The fact that Christmas is such a short period of time, means that the poor suffer for longer and need help at all other times of the year, to be able to aid their struggles properly. The metaphor, ‘open their shut-up hearts freely’, has references back to earlier in Stave 1 when Scrooge was described as “solitary as an oyster”. Oysters tend to be closed-off and isolated but in this case, at Christmas, people are opening-up, changing and being more caring to the poor, unlike Scrooge, who is ungenerous and stubborn. This shows how different he is to other people, making the reader want him to change, and be a better person. The use of the railway-based metaphor, ‘fellow-passengers to the grave’ emphasises the idea of transience. Even though we may be different due to our social classes, for example, we all finish the same, and die someday – nobody is immune to death and lives forever. This implies that we are more similar than different and therefore people should not be oppressed entirely because of their social class. Furthermore, the fact that the metaphor creates the imagery of a train suggests that even if people ‘get-off’ at different times and take divergent roads in life, we all end up at the same ‘last-stop’ as everyone else. The noun ‘creatures’ reinforces the fact that the wealthy, through Dickens’ eyes, view the poor as somewhat inhumane as ‘creatures’ is often used to describe wild and even at times, lethal animals: not humans that just happen to be of a lower social class. Dickens attempts to make this belief sound absurd, to show the reader that this attitude is unacceptable and therefore the ‘Poor Law’, that causes society to be draconian in its treatment of the idle, must be changed, or abolished. (Elia Palacin, Year 11)
How much detail to put into a quotation explosion - getting the rhythm right (and wrong)
Quotation explosions aren’t about analysing every individual method in the quotation in as much detail as you possibly can, dragging out each bit of analysis for several sentences. They’re not about waffle, essentially.
The rhythm of the analysis should be fast: method, meaning, method, meaning, method, meaning.
This is what it means to be concise in your analysis. Elsewhere in your essays there will be time for you to develop the analysis of one individual method as far as it will go, but you don’t need to be doing that here too, otherwise you’ll never get to the end of the analysis. Instead you should be trying to cram in as many methods as possible into a condensed piece of analysis.
However — and this is really important — you must ensure that your analysis is clear. This is where students often go wrong with this skill. There is a fine line between clear, concise analysis (good) and vague analysis (bad).
To make this concept as clear as possible for you, let’s look at one final example, both of what you should be doing and, first of all, what you need to avoid doing. The example that follows is not a good one, for reasons we will outline fully afterwards. We’ll then show you the good version of the same analysis.
Example 3 - a bad quotation explosion that looks like a good one
In 'Walking Away' Cecil Day-Lewis suggests that it is possible for a parent to accept and even welcome their child's growing up. In the middle of the poem, the speaker compares his son’s walking away towards school to "a winged seed” being “loosened from its parent stem." Through the simile here Day-Lewis suggests that the process of separation is natural and, thus, inevitable. This is not a hugely positive or embracing idea, but the ‘seed’ imagery suggests that the speaker is feeling optimistic. This optimism is then furthered by the adjective ‘winged’ with its suggestion of excitement and possibility amid the uncertainty. It is with the verb ‘loosened’, however, that we most clearly see the speaker’s shift towards positivity. It suggests the speaker is beginning to accept the inevitability of separation: it can be a slow and painless thing. Because this is how growing up works. It is inevitable, and it can be seen as painful and unpleasant, or it can be seen as something profoundly hopeful – the start of an extraordinary new thing, something totally novel in the universe, a new tree, a new person. Here, Day-Lewis shows a father’s gradual, reluctant acceptance of this fact.
At first glance, this paragraph seems to fit the bill: it takes a single quotation and zooms into various elements, providing concise analysis: method, meaning, method, meaning, method, meaning.
However, this analysis is not very good. It is concise, yes, but it is also vague and therefore unclear. Each time a method is analysed we are left with the same question: why? Let's look at the analysis one bit at a time so you can see what we mean:
1. Through the simile here Day-Lewis suggests that the process of separation is natural and, thus, inevitable.
This is vague analysis. Why does the simile suggest that? What's the link between the simile and the idea that separation is inevitable? The analysis needs to explain this, but it can do so in a concise way, keeping it to one sentence, like this:
1. Through the simile here, with its natural imagery, Day-Lewis suggests that the process of separation is natural and, thus, inevitable: it is a part of nature and necessary for the continuation of the species.
That’s better. Now let's look at the next bit of analysis.
2. This is not a hugely positive or embracing idea, but the ‘seed’ imagery suggests that the speaker is feeling optimistic.
Again, why? Why does the seed imagery suggest optimism? This needs to be explained for the analysis to be clear. We can again achieve this without extending the analysis beyond a single sentence:
2. This is not a hugely positive or embracing idea, but the ‘seed’ imagery suggests something more optimistic by implying the possibility of future growth – a new tree will be born, something new will be created.
That’s better. Now let's look at the next bit of analysis.
3. This optimism is then furthered by the adjective ‘winged’ with its suggestion of excitement and possibility amid the uncertainty.
You can see the problem now, right? Why does this adjective suggest excitement and possibility? The analysis needs to say. Again, we can do it without going beyond a single sentence of analysis:
3. This optimism is then furthered by the adjective ‘winged’ with its suggestion of excitement: the child is taking flight here and so there is possibility amid the uncertainty – where will the seed (the child) land?
Let's look at the final bit of analysis to see how we can fix the last part of the paragraph.
4. It is with the verb ‘loosened’, however, that we most clearly see the speaker’s shift towards positivity. It suggests the speaker is beginning to accept the inevitability of separation: it can be a slow and painless thing.
WHY?! WHY DOES IT SUGGEST THAT? (This is what teachers feel like when we read this kind of analysis.) Here’s a better version which is still only two sentences long:
4. It is with the verb ‘loosened’, however, that we most clearly see the speaker’s shift towards optimism. It conveys a gentle and gradual separation, in contrast to the verb “wrenched” used in the first stanza, suggesting that the speaker is beginning to accept the inevitability of separation: it can be a slow and painless thing.
With all the analysis fixed, we are left with the paragraph below. This is a good example of a quotation explosion. The first and last parts are the same, and it still has that rapid rhythm (method, meaning, method, meaning, method, meaning), with just a sentence or so of concise analysis for each method, but the analysis is consistently clear in this version.
Example 4 - the bad quotation explosion fixed
In 'Walking Away' Cecil Day-Lewis suggests that it is possible for a parent to accept and even welcome their child's growing up. In the middle of the poem, the speaker compares his son’s walking away towards school to "a winged seed” being “loosened from its parent stem." Through the simile here, with its natural imagery, Day-Lewis suggests that the process of separation is natural and, thus, inevitable: it is a part of nature and necessary for the continuation of the species. This is not a hugely positive or embracing idea, but the ‘seed’ imagery suggests something more optimistic by implying the possibility of future growth – a new tree will be born, something new will be created. This optimism is then furthered by the adjective ‘winged’ with its suggestion of excitement: the child is taking flight here and so there is possibility amid the uncertainty – where will the seed (the child) land? It is with the verb ‘loosened’, however, that we most clearly see the speaker’s shift towards optimism. It conveys a gentle and gradual separation, in contrast to the verb “wrenched” used in the first stanza, suggesting that the speaker is beginning to accept the inevitability of separation: it can be a slow and painless thing. Because this is how growing up works. It is inevitable, and it can be seen as painful and unpleasant, or it can be seen as something profoundly hopeful – the start of an extraordinary new thing, something totally novel in the universe, a new tree, a new person. Here, Day-Lewis shows a father’s gradual, reluctant acceptance of this fact.
When to include a quotation explosion and how to plan for it
Having seen these examples, it should be clear that you can’t do this for every bit of evidence in an essay. Nor should you try to. Sometimes you need evidence that isn’t chocked full of methods but which helps to support your paragraph point or essay thesis. This is perfectly fine. In fact, it’s more than fine: it’s essential. If you try to do a quotation explosion for every bit of evidence, then your overall essay will suffer as a result because you won’t be able to cover enough of the text to get the highest marks. So use quotation explosions sparingly.
However, as we have said, if you want to get a grade 9 you do need to do this at least once in every essay, and ideally more than once, depending on how much detail you are able to go into in your first attempt. (If your first attempt is as detailed as the examples above, once is enough.) But it’s not easy to do this, especially in timed conditions. And this is where your revision and planning comes in, both before and during the exam:
You should revise quotation explosions. As part of your revision for texts at GCSE, you will need to memorise a bank of quotations. You probably know this already if you’re reading this guide. It’s beyond the scope of this guide to explain what quotations you should memorise, and we have a section of the website dedicated to this, but one of the criteria should be this: can you create a quotation explosion from the quotation? You must have several quotations for each text for which you memorise not only the words in the text but the techniques that you can analyse in the quotation in order to create this kind of detailed analysis.
You should also plan quotation explosions. When you are planning your essay in an exam, you should keep in mind that you need to do this somewhere in your essay. But where? And with what quotation? Before you start writing, you should already have decided the answers to these questions, and you should have it noted down in your plan. If it were me, I would write ‘QE’ next to the relevant bit in the plan as a reminder.
You should also look out for a possible quotation explosion in the extract in the question, if you are given one. The worst case scenario is that none of your memorised quotations work for the question you are given. This is not the end of the world. For the questions for which you are given an extract (everything except An Inspector Calls), there will be a section which supports this kind of detailed analysis. You just need to look carefully for it.
Summing up – key things to remember when developing your analysis of methods to create a quotation explosion
Before you attempt this first master basic methods analysis
Before you attempt this become proficient at writing about big ideas and writing about context
Choose the base quotation wisely – it needs to be very meaningful, with lots of possible words and phrases that you can zoom into
Include all the most meaningful parts of the quotation in your evidence sentence
Work through each of the methods in your evidence sentence one at a time, explaining their meaning and linking them to big ideas or context when possible
Remember to link all the analysis back to your paragraph point and/or thesis as you go through
Try to get the rhythm of the quotation explosion right: it should be a rapid pass through lots of different methods, with concise analysis of each
Make sure your analysis is concise but clear - you must say why the method has the effect you describe
Revise quotation explosions – memorise both the quotations and the analysis
Look out for opportunities to create a quotation explosion in the extract, if you’re given one