How do you open a literature essay?
I’ve returned to a strategy I introduced in my second year of teaching, before replacing it with something more formulaic – and my students love it!
It’s hardly ground-breaking, but opening on a ‘golden nugget’ – a quotation that encapsulates your overall argument – is a fantastic way to grab the examiner’s attention from the outset. For example: “‘We are members of one body’: Inspector Goole’s parting warning is not just a line of dialogue but the moral argument of Priestley’s entire play.”
As long as the quotation does real work to support your thesis, and is well embedded in the opening sentence, it makes a lovely rhetorical flourish.
On a broader note, I sometimes wish ‘style’ were assessed as a discrete objective in English Literature. It carries real weight in creative writing for English Language, but in Literature only around 4 marks are left for anything stylistic, and those are for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Yet style matters in literary essays, as any good journal article or critical book will testify.
There must be all sorts of ways students can bring an argument about a literary text to life without relying on mechanical formulas and sentence starters.
If you have other strategies for introducing ‘flair’ into essay writing at GCSE or A Level, please share them in the comments below or by direct message!
