Help marking

I do Sign Of Four, I am doing a question from the 2017 past paper and need help in marking one of my paragraphs, anyone care to help and give me feedback?

Arthur Conan Doyle wants to portray one of his protagonists, Sherlock Holmes as an uncanny but interesting investigator via the methods he used. Within the extract, the writer uses listing of display all Sherlock's investigative methods; 'measuring, comparing, examining' to highlight his intricate attention to detail, carefully inspecting every and any variable, deducting if it plays a crucial role towards finding the cause and purpose of Bartholomew Sholto's death. Additionally, the way Sherlock analyses all of the information at once when he just arrived at the crime scene represents his massive thinking capacity and knowledge in his field which is ironically better than that of the whole police force's investigation unit, picturing him as a strange, interesting vigilante in the eyes of a reader. Alternatively, the novel as a whole, the writer wants to emphasize the development in contrast between Sherlock's investigative abilities and the poor efficacy of the whole police department in the 1890s to illustrate the many complaints, criticism and hate towards it; that it is largely incompetent, due to frequent bribery, leading to high crime rates such as murders (Bartholomew Sholto) similarly to before the system was ever introduced. Therefore, the writer uses literary techniques to not only convey Sherlock's uncanny and interesting abilities, but to serve as a counterpoint to the police department's usefulness both in the extract and in the whole novel.

Reply 1

arwen-mccarthy81

You need to add lots of quotes into the paragraph i would recommend doing 1 long quote at the beginning of the paragraph then lots of short ones , you generally need about 5 per paragraph , also i would make your paragraphs a bit longer because in an essay the general amount of paragraphs is 3 so you need to make them chunkier to fill the time in the exam, other than that , i think your analysis and writing is very good and you should be proud of this

Reply 2

fenyxperyton

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Focus on only one/two quotes per paragraph - don't jump all over the text in one paragraph

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Connect your quote to more than one rhetoric device, or select quotes that have more than one rhetoric devices

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Provide evidence for all of the points you make (ie I personally have no idea if "the way Sherlock analyses... when he just arrived" refers to your chosen quote or the investigation as a whole)

Overall, though, I really like how you provided more than one interpretation, and how you inserted context! Although you didn't really settle on analysing one quote, you were still consistent on a single, interesting core concept!

(top tip! If you wanna quote a very long string of text, add an ellipsis and only write the most important words in a quote. For example, if the quote is "The intense winds were unbearable to resist, and I could only sense my grip loosen and the gales whipping my face", then you can simply shorten it to, "The intense winds were... whipping my face")