Paper 1 is a guided textual analysis and - as we know from the Subject Guide and from the Subject Report - it is imperative to structure your response around the guiding question or statement. This page will help you on what those look like.
What is a guided textual analysis?
It's better to think about what this Paper 1 analysis is not - unlike the previous course, it is not a 'commentary' on the whole text. There is simply not the time for that afforded in this paper, in which you'll only have about 50 minutes to write a response to each stimulus text, once reading, annotation, and planning time is taken away.
Instead, just like the Individual Oral and the Higher Level Essay, it is about following a line of inquiry and producing an analytical argument in response to a guiding question or statement. Ideas on how to do this and what good might look like can be found in Paper 1 - Structuring a Guided Textual Analysis.
This page is designed so that you can see the real examples of guiding questions from the sample examination papers so you can anticipate what may appear in your own Paper 1 examination. However, there is one caveat: if you don't like the guiding question for your text, you can ignore it only if you produce your own line of inquiry, i.e. you would essentially have to write your own guiding question and answer that instead. By exploring the examples below, you should have some idea of how to do this, should this be your preferred course of action.
Paper 1 - Guiding Questions & Statements
Below you will find real Paper 1 examination guiding questions / statements and those from specimen papers, too:
A routine analysis of these when put together show that they are a balanced mix of questions and statements, and that they tend to refer to both a "choice" (a feature or two) and an "effect" ('provoke a narrative', 'express the author's opinion', 'persuade the reader to take action'). Notably, they often name the text type, reducing the stress on you as students on trying to work out which text type it is.
Task
Take a past paper or a specimen paper... or indeed, any non-literary text you have looked at in class (something from one of your bodies of work).
Try writing a guiding question or statement to create your own (different) line of inquiry. Use the examples above as a guide for how to form the question.
Plan a response using the structural guide from elsewhere in this site.
How much of Paper 1 - Writing Guiding Questions have you understood?
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