Tentative Language

Claude insisted yesterday that I was ‘hedging’ too much when I asked it to proofread a resource that I had made for one of my literature students.

This was because the resource was trying to model the kind of ‘tentative’ language that students need when exploring the writer’s intentions and/or the reader’s response.

Sentences such as ‘Perhaps Shakespeare wished to express to his audience...’ were flagged as ‘unsure of what the writer actually did’.

However, this kind of tentative language is one of the markers of a higher-level response in GCSE English Literature and is actively encouraged by teachers, schools and exam boards – we want an ‘exploratory’ response.

From a wider theoretical standpoint, we often don’t ‘know’ what a writer intended (this goes back to Wimsatt and Beardsley in the 1940s), so expressing ourselves using tentative language and showing an awareness of alternative interpretations is an integral part of the subject.