KNOWLEDGE
The difference between references and quotations
Often we use the terms ‘evidence’ (what the exam board call ‘references’) and ‘quotations’ (or ‘quotes’) interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing, but that’s not the case, and at GCSE especially understanding when to use quotations in your evidence and when to use specific references as evidence is important to understand. This short guide will explain the difference and why it matters.
Evidence is not the same as quotation
There is an important difference between the evidence part of an essay and the idea of quotation from the text, namely that evidence does not necessarily need to include quotation. This is very important at GCSE because the exams are closed-book (e.g. you don’t have the text to refer to).
AQA, the exam board we use, never discuss quotations in their feedback, they only talk about ‘references’. They want you to be able to point towards specific bits of each text and say what it means and how it supports your argument in relation to the question. You are marked for this in what AQA call ‘AO1 REFS’. But you don’t need to learn quotations from the text in order to do this. You just need you to learn what happens in each text really well. This is what the exam board are looking for: know the text well. They say this in EVERY SINGLE EXAMINER’S REPORT: successful candidates are the ones who know the texts really well. So this should be your first priority in your revision for English Literature GCSE - know the texts really well.
However, to get the very top grades you need to learn some quotations because you need to analyse methods. In the remainder of this short guide, we’ll look at the difference between these two things: references vs. quotations.
Referencing the text for ‘AO1 REFS’
Let’s consider An Inspector Calls, since it’s a text with far too many ‘key quotations’ for any regular human to learn. It is a play that wears its heart on its sleeve, so to speak, and as a result many of its lines convey pretty directly the big ideas that Priestley is trying to communicate to his audience. This can make it daunting when it comes to trying to decide which quotations to learn by heart because every other line seems to be important.
However, the reality is that you don’t need to learn most of the quotations that students choose to memorise from this play. Instead, you just need to know that each particular thing happens, and when it happens, and then you can reference it in your essays without quotation.
Consider this example, which lots of people choose to memorise for no good reason:
Sheila: (excited) Oh – Gerald – you’ve got it – is it the one you wanted me to have?
This is a reasonably significant moment in the play’s exposition and one that you may want to write about in essays on Sheila or Gerald, or on gender or power as themes. But (and this is really important) you don't need to know any of the specific words that Sheila uses to do this — you just need to know that this is a thing that happens early on in the play. If you want to write about this incident, you just need to reference it in your evidence, like this:
Contextualised example of evidence for this part of the play: In Act 1, during the exposition, Gerald gets out an engagement ring for Sheila, and she asks if it's the one he wanted her to have.
This is more than specific enough for you to get the top marks for AO1 REFS, providing you analyse the evidence well, and it doesn’t require any quotation at all. With this reference you can still analyse this part of the play for what it tells us about Sheila’s or Gerald’s character (AO1), or about the power dynamics of Edwardian relationships or gender inequality or whatever big idea you want to discuss (AO3), but you don't need to learn the quotation word-for-word in order to do this.
The other handy thing about quotation-free evidence sentences is that you can use them to reference multiple different sections of a text that you want to analyse together. Consider this example from Macbeth:
A point and some contextualised non-quotation-based evidence from Macbeth: Shakespeare uses Macbeth’s early kingship to emphasise the extent to which power can corrupt a person. In the opening scenes of Act 3, Macbeth is a totally changed man, plotting to murder his best friend, manipulating the feeble murderers into do his bidding by questioning their manhood and keeping all of his diabolical plans a secret from his wife.
From this starting point, you could write some really thoughtful analysis of big ideas around power and corruption, or kingship, or manhood, or about the role reversal between the Macbeths, all based on Macbeth’s behaviour at the start of Act 3 of the play. If you tried to do this with a quotation you would be forced to write about a single moment in the play, rather than writing about this entire section. Doing it this way (without quotation) would allow you to meet the assessment criteria for AO1 and AO3, and even for AO2 if you analysed the characterisation of Macbeth, as a method. All of this is possible without quotation, providing you know the text really well.
Ultimately, the key thing you need to realise is that memorising quotations that don’t contain methods (e.g. “these girls aren't cheap labour — they're people" ) is generally a waste of memory space. Instead you need to learn the plot really well. Then you can reference all the different moments specifically in your essays, without the need for direct quotation, like in the two examples above. Learning the plot is a much better use of your memory space than pointlessly learning quotations that don’t contain methods.
What quotations to learn
With all of that said, there is a reason to learn actual quotations by heart: when those quotations contain methods that you can analyse for AO2. Without the exact words and phrases that a writer uses, it can often be difficult to analyse the methods (the ‘how’) in their writing, which you have to do for AO2 — an assessment objective which is worth more than a third of the marks in GCSE English Literature.
Now, there are methods that don’t require quotation — structural methods, characterisation, symbolism (sometimes), methods that are used as a pattern like the motif of blood in Macbeth, or the motif of cold/heat in A Christmas Carol, the use of dashes to convey emotion in An Inspector Calls, or the use of prose in Lady Macbeth’s final scene in Macbeth. All of these methods can be analysed just by referencing the text without quotation, like in the examples above. However, most methods need the actual words, and this is where memorising quotations comes in.
If you want to get the highest marks, you will need to memorise some quotations from each text so you can analyse the methods in those quotations. All of the quotations included in this part of the website have been chosen with this purpose in mind. They all contain specific words or phrases that the writers use which can be analysed for AO2, or, in a few cases, linked to specific aspects of the context for AO3. You should make flash cards from them and memorise both the quotations and the analysis that goes with them.