AO2: Analysis is the root of everything else (in the world!)
Using AO2 to ‘unlock’ the other assessment objectives. Your ability to analyse what you read really is the key to success in English. You have shown you are very skilled analysts already! So let’s think about the skills involved. * focusing closely on your chosen area (i.e. essay title) * thinking carefully about how you’ll construct a clear ‘argument’ * selecting the most relevant chapters/poems to help your argument * looking closely within them for the most relevant images/descriptions/techniques * explaining clearly how they fit into your argument * tying your argument together by linking your points and examples – voila!
The first two steps have been done for you today!

This is the extract that the exam board used for their examples, from E.M. Forster’s Room With a View. It is a description of Lucy’s arrival in Florence, and her first impressions of the hotel she will stay in, the Pension Bertolini.
Try to take note of the development that takes place, from the band 1 response up to band 5.

“And a cockney, besides!” said Lucy, who had been further saddened by the Signora’s unexpected accent. “It might be London.” She looked at the two rows of English people who were sitting at the table; at the row of white bottles of water and red bottles of wine that ran between the English people; at the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framed; at the notice of the English church (Rev. Cuthbert Eager, M.A. Oxon.), that was the only other decoration of the wall. “Charlotte, don’t you feel that we might be in London?”

* What can you tell Lucy’s response? How might this be used in an essay response? What kind of close analysis do you think a student writing about this text might apply here?

This is the one I’d like you to look at from The Handmaid’s Tale. It is a description, from chapter 13, of Offred’s body, and the way she has come to feel about it in her role of handmaid. Remember that you won’t be able to comment on everything! So focus on the significance of the imagery she employs. What can you say about its effect?

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.