Isum kindly donated his essay so that students could learn from it.
Here is a full mark answer. It may surprise you.
It is difficult to read, so I will type out the answer for you if you want to skip ahead:
Most full mark essays are 900 words long, or more.
Plan
My experience of top grade students is that they don’t spend long planning. There are no marks for your plan.
This plan just jots down the 4 things our student wants to say about Priestley’s point of view. Only he can read it, it is so messy! That’s because he is moving at speed. Points make prizes and the fastest hand wins.
Thesis and Opening Paragraph
In the didactic play ‘An Inspector Calls’, I strongly agree that Priestley constructs the play to convey the message that inequality leads to tragedy.
He tackles inequality between businessmen and working class, to gender inequality to present the flaws present in Edwardian society,
and how these still need to be changed even in contemporary society.
When I set it out this way, you can see that we have a 3 part thesis statement.
This gives you 3 of Priestley’s ideas to prove in your essay. It tells the examiner straight away that you will at least be ‘thoughtful’ for Level 5, and possibly ‘convincing’ and ‘perceptive’ for Level 6.
This means that, as they read, they are trying to build toward giving you this mark.
Priestley constructs Birling as a proxy for a stereotypical Edwardian Edwardian capitalist to portray his selfish views as flawed, due to his lack of equality.
Birling claims metaphorically that he is a ‘hard headed man of business’. This immediately establishes a capitalist persona of Birling, to then later represent that inequality is due to capitalism.
This perhaps alludes to Stanley Baldwin, as he claimed that capitalists profited from war, and Birling is made to act as a fool as he states that ‘there is nothing to gain and everything to lose by war’, in which the juxtaposition is ironic and he is portrayed as a fool.
Once Priestley establishes Birling as a foolish capitalist, Birling claims that he seeks ‘higher prices’ and ‘lower wages’. This illustrates the immense exploitation of workers from capitalist business men, increasing the wealth gap, producing large economic inequality which eventually leads to a tragedy - Eva’s death.
Capitalism is portrayed to be a source of those actions, as since then Attlee won the labour vote by a landslide majority in 1945.
One of the fascinating bits of research I’ve carried out is what predicts a top grade essay?
It has absolutely nothing to do with paragraph structures. I find this really fascinating, because most English departments have a preferred structure.
Yet, when I read essays, no student keeps to a paragraph structure under pressure of the exam. And absolutely no top grade student relies on one.
This is something I long suspected - the best essay simply has as many explanations as possible to prove its argument.
So, these are the 3 things which make the most difference to your grade:
The more explanations, the higher your mark. (Isum gives about 40 of these in the whole essay).
Therefore, the faster you write - the more words you write - the higher your mark. I teach this as ‘the fastest hand wins the duel’.
The more your explanations are about the writer’s point of view, the higher your mark.
So, that is why I am laying this essay out this way - one explanation in each paragraph. You wouldn’t write it that way in the exam - although you could. It is just to show you how marks are building up.
Notice that the examiner is being cautious in their annotations. They haven’t read my guide to An Inspector Calls, so they know nothing about Stanley Baldwin, and why this is so relevant to an audience in 1945. So, they just treat the context as ‘explained’, Level 3.
They get more excited when there is a quote analysis. Notice Isum goes straight in to explaining how this reveals Priestley’s ideas, which is why it is ‘clear understanding’ Level 4.
Priestley wanted to boost these changes.
He further promotes this through the dramatic device as we hear a “sharp ring of the door bell” in which the Inspector interrupts Birling’s foolish speech about capitalism, and suggests that his capitalist view has summoned the death of Eva.
Priestley could be portraying these views of Birling as a tool to allow the rich, upper class audience that could afford to watch this play, to reflect upon themselves and evaluate whether they are acting like Birling.
Isum realises that the easiest way to build an argument is to work through the text chronologically.
This, by the way, is also the best way to write an argument in the extract questions - deal with the extract chronologically, where it appears in your argument.
Now Isum is using more context to back up an interpretation of Priestley’s views, so the examiner has moved the AO3 context mark up to ‘clear understanding’.
Furthermore, Priestley conveys the stark gender (in) equality at the time, to convey how men abused their power and exploited women, leading to women being shunned away from society.
Eric claims that he ‘was in that state where a chap turns nasty’. The generalised adjective ‘that’ suggests that this state was common at the time, along with the adjective ‘nasty’ which indicates the abhorrent general behaviour performed towards women at the time.
Priestley constructs this to a regular Edwardian young man who sexually exploits working class women to convey the immense gender inequality at the time.
In fact, when Eric ‘threatened to make a row’, it portrays the fact that Eric had all the power, as if he (were) reported at the time, society would turn a blind eye on Eva due to the misogynistic patriarchal society at the time - rape was not even illegal back then.
Consequently it was Eric’s unsympathetic exploitation which took a part in Eva’s death.
Priestley clearly portrays the lack of responsibility of males leading to tragedy, especially as he (Eric) refers to himself as a ‘chap’ rather than himself, distancing himself from the act he committed.
This is the kind of section of your essay you can plan in advance. If you have this in your memory, you will find it is relevant to every single essay that comes up. Even if the essay is only on Sheila, you will be able to refer to how Priestley contrasts her guilt and responsibility with Eric’s.
This is even more certain because you are given a choice of two questions, one of which is always about a theme.
It is always easier to get a grade 9 by choosing the theme question, rather than the character question, because it forces you to write about Priestley’s ideas.
Although this looks like an extended analysis of a quote, it is actually an extended analysis of the incident, with a range of quotes. This is not a massive What, Where, How, Why paragraph, or any other paragraph technique, exploding a single quote till it dies on the page.
It is simply linking lots of explanations in an argument.
Because the explanation always uses quotes, it ends up convincing the examiner, so it gets Level 6 for AO2 language analysis.
By the way, there are no marks for naming adjectives.
And rape was definitely a crime in 1945!
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