hello and welcome back to another lesson now one of the common bits of teacher feedback that tends to really confuse a lot of English students is that they are not analyzing enough in their essays so often a lot of students even the students that attend to tutor and help tend to say okay Miss I have literally answered the question directly I've selected a quotation I've even mentioned for example the writer is used metaphor they used dis simil they use literation yet my teacher is saying I'm not analyzing enough I'm completely stomped I don't know where
I'm going wrong this is a really really common issue that a lot of students face and of course if you're facing it yourself you're not alone so what I want to show you guys is how to effectively analyze any quotation in any English essay using just three simple steps now with these steps what I don't want you to confuse these steps for is the entire paragraph structure okay when it comes to shaping your English essays and you know using whichever paragraph structure that you like so for example my preferred paragraph method is the peel paragraph
structure which I think is perfect okay starting off with the point evidence explanation and then link so if you use that then this goes into the second e of your peel paragraph the explanation however if you use pretzel if you use peel if you use petal etc etc in the explanation part of your paragraph This is where you now add those three steps when analyzing your selected quotation okay so what I want to show you guys now is I'm going to walk you through the three steps the three really simple steps you need to take
when you're analyzing quotations in your essays and then I'm going to present you guys with two examples taken from just two random plays but these examples literally are just kind of to illustrate how I've applied those three steps these steps can be used for any essay either you know if you're given an unseen language extract or a fiction extract a nonfiction extract a play a novel whatever literally you can use these three steps for any text that you were presented with but I'm just giving two random examples one taken from McBeth the play by Shakespeare
and one taken from An Inspector Calls by priy okay but these these three steps can literally be applied to any extract that you are analyzing okay so let's begin by going over the three steps to effectively analyzing any quote within your English essay now remember that step number one when you're analyzing any quotation in your English essay is Begin by mentioning the technique and often a lot of students kind of do this and then stop there before they move on to then start yet another paragraph Okay however starting off your quotation so I'm assuming already
that you've selected the quotation right so of course for example you're writing your pill paragraph you open but with your point answering the question then you select the question quotation now after you selected the quotation this is the first thing that you need to do but you don't stop there okay so you first begin by selecting and identifying a technique mentioning the effect it has on the quote as a whole what I mean by that is when you select the quotation and then you identify whether the writer has used a metaphor aimil alliteration personification whatever
that's great but you don't stop there because that means you're stopping in just this point and your kind of your analysis is very shallow okay so mentioning the technique and talking about how the technique is really powerful in you know conveying a certain image or conveying whatever it is that's happening within the text that's great but that's still just a little bit of analysis then you need to then do a bit more of a deep dive in Step number two where when you look at the quotation that you've selected you've picked out the technique then
zoom in just a little bit more pick out a word from the same quotation label that word and then mention how it suggests or it connotes a certain image or a certain effect or whatever what I mean by that is let's say for example you select a quotation which uses a form of metaphor then you look at that same quotation and then say you find the word red within that quotation and then you want to now zoom in so you label the red which is describing a noun as an adjective so you mentioned for example
you know the writer uses this really powerful adjective which connotes which indirectly suggests danger blood fear okay so when you're mentioning how it canotes something or how it paints an image in our minds this is now where you're going one layer uh level or one one level deeper when you're analyzing okay so you start off by talking about the technique you know the general metaphor whatever but now when you zoom in and then you're talking about okay what does this paint in our minds what does this noun what does this verb what does this adjective
whatever do in terms of suggesting something to us you're now stepping one level in when you're analyzing the effect and then step number three so you don't stop there you then mention and evaluate what effect you think the writer wanted to have on the reader or the audience okay so when you pick up the quotation you mention it's a metaphor IE you then mention and find that there's an adjective say red which canotes blood or danger whatever then you then think the effect that the writer may have had is perhaps the writer wanted you as
the reader or the audience to feel a sense of fear maybe the author wants you to foreshadow to to predict something that the reader might remember later on in the novel whatever it is you then think and suggest okay the author has done this because I think this is the effect they wanted to have on the reader okay so those are three steps now as I said I'm going to give you guys two random examples just to show you how you can apply these steps when you're analyzing a quotation the first is taken from McBeth
again you don't need to have context for example if you haven't studied MC Beth this is just more an illustrative example of how you can apply it okay so the question is how does Shakespeare present ambition which is one of the key words in the question and the quotation of selected which I then will then apply these steps is Within the play MC Beth of selected vaulting ambition which over leaps itself that's the quotation I've selected now when I'm going through the analysis right so this is I've selected my quotation I would begin by mentioning
the technique so for example the entire quote the author or the playright Shakespeare uses personification here to illustrate how the speaker in this case McBeth is really frightened of the great ambition he has he uses this personification to illustrate how ambition is almost tripping over itself CU it can't handle the weight of in this case the crown okay that's step number one but I don't stop there then I then zoom in and I pick one particular word and in this case when I'm looking at this quotation I think the adjective vaulting which describes ambition is
really powerful again what this is doing is it's conting how this ambition is way too vast way too great for the speaker MC Beth to handle but then I don't stop there I then mention when it comes to Shakespeare's intent for his audience I will then perhaps mention that Shakespeare wants to illustrate how ambition can be quite a frightening thing to hold and to have okay and what maybe Shakespeare is trying to intend for his audience to think about is maybe it's not a great idea to be ambitious because if you then get what you
want maybe you're not going to be able to handle the power that comes with it okay so that's my first example however the other example I want to show you is taken from a PL called An Inspector Calls okay and the question being how does freey present social responsibility again you don't need to be familiar with displ I'm just going to walk you guys through how you can apply these three steps so the quotation of selected taken from this PL is uttered by or said by a character called inspector ghoul and this character says we
are members of one body so I then begin I would if I were writing about this and talking about social responsibility the idea that we need to look after each other especially we need to look after people who are weaker or poorer than us I would begin with this quotation and mentioning the overall effect and the technique of the that's used in the overall quotation so in this case the technique that's used is a metaphor then when I'm looking at this metaphor of course would mention is the idea that perhaps the playright is conveying the
message to his audience that we all have some kind of Duty to look after each other through this metaphor however when I then go one step further in I would probably pick out this one word body which is a noun and now here the this noun what it connotes the suggestion that it has is this notion that we're all tied together when we do one thing to each other actually everyone else is affected right right we can't just ignore our duties to each other for example right so that would be the additional layer of analysis
I would do and the third step of course is when I then evaluate priest's intent for his audience maybe what i' then talk about is arguably Priestly uses this metaphor to convey to his listeners and his audience that they need to reflect on how they treat other people in society so once they've finished watching this play and they go away with his impart message right so the message behind this play he may be intense for his audience to think about perhaps how they maybe have in the past ignored their social responsibility to other people right
again that's an interpretation and some form of evaluation I'm doing which is not directly implied in this quotation but that's now where the power of analysis comes in and that's what your English teachers wants to see okay so that's really it when it comes to how to effectively analyze any quotation in your English essays make sure you follow these three step steps and you will find that your teachers will absolutely love your analysis and this is how you do the Deep dive this is how you go deep when you take one quotation and then you
really unpack it when you're analyzing in your English essays thank you so much for listening
