English Paper 1 (TZ2 - SL)

how did you all find the prose? what kind of themes did you use? I tried answering 3 out of 4 guiding questions, but couldn't find many literary devices from it. That was a bad paper for me...

I did the prose too! Personally I was thankful for the passage that was given- it was straight forward ad up-front enough to quickly understand. The theme I discussed was that of conflict being the basis of literature and, particular to this prose, it was the conflict between Wimsey's rational mind and the pure irrationality and deliriousness of seeing a ghost- and of a dead wife at that!

I talked a lot about the build up of the conflict; from the inciting force of seeing the ghost, to the rising action, to the climax of fainting, and finally to the falling action of being revived by some guy at on the platform with "tea"- tea being a very ordinary, everyday object which contrasts with the supernatural nature of seeing ghosts, at which point the passage ends quite appropriately as the conflict ends and there is nothing else to write about.. haha.

My structure was the following: intro, analysis of the first two paragraphs, characterization of Doris, characterization of Wimsey's wife, and finally the contrast between the supernatural and the everyday, the effect of the third person limited narration, the comic style of the diction, and finally a sweet conclusion about how, although Wimsey is a protagonist in the passage, he is amere tool for the author to express his purpose of showing what an encounter with a ghost may be like.

I wrote 11.5 sides.

oh wow, thanks! Yours seems really good to me.

I mainly described the characterisation, and I made some comments on the comic effect and the introduction as suggested by the guiding questions, so at least it's reassuring that we took note on common points in the passage. However, I didn't analyse other aspects you mentioned (the contrast, narrative view, purpose etc), and I didn't really have a proper theme. I just stated it's about a guy's experience of meeting a ghost. My essay was short too with only 4 sides, hopefully I can still get a decent mark without being completely off-topic.

dont worry....u r not the only one who wrote only 4 sides.
i talked about use of metaphor, foreshadowing, narattive, repetition, imagery, metaphor and diction.