Mirroring

One of the hardest skills to teach students is how to analyse structure as part of the GCSE.

Even harder is to discuss how sentence length can create meaning.

Having worked as an examiner, I noticed some students drawing upon the idea of 'mirroring' when analysing structure for Question 3. This isn't a technical term as such, but it is a useful tool to get them thinking about how a sentence's length can shape meaning.

So for example, a short sentence might 'mirror' the breathlessness of the protagonist; a long sentence might 'mirror' their racing thoughts.

Working with GCSE students on structure this week has reminded me just how useful this idea of 'mirroring' is when trying to join the dots between sentence length and meaning.