The Question That Prints the Text for You
📖 The Question That Prints the Text for You
Paper 1, Section A. The question prints a passage — twelve to eighteen lines of Shakespeare or your 19th-century novel. Under the extract it says: "Starting with this extract, explore how the writer presents…"
Two types of student open their booklet. The first type reads the extract and writes twelve lines about it. The second type uses the extract as a door into the whole text — and walks through it. The mark scheme is designed to reward the second. This topic teaches you to be the second.
English Literature glossary
- What is Sin 5 in AQA Lit, and what does it cost you?
- Sin 5 is treating the extract in isolation — writing only about the printed passage and never engaging with the whole play or novel. The AQA mark scheme explicitly caps responses that stay within the extract at Level 2. Even the most perceptive close-reading cannot reach Level 3 without whole-text engagement. The command 'starting with this extract' is an invitation to begin there, not end there.
The command is "starting with this extract, explore…" — not "analyse this extract." "Starting with" is a structural instruction, not a boundary. AQA are telling you where to begin the essay's telescope, not where to stop it.
Earn the mark scheme marks
🧠 Memory Aid: The Telescope
Think of the extract question as a telescope. Close reading is the eyepiece — precision, magnification, exact language. Zoom-out is rotating to a lower magnification — structural perspective, the whole text visible. Re-embed is switching back to the eyepiece with the new perspective built in — now you see what you were looking at differently.
The three positions: IN → OUT → IN (with new eyes).
A student who stays at eyepiece magnification sees the detail but not the pattern. A student who zooms out and stays out sees the pattern but not the detail. A student who moves between both — and argues what the movement reveals — is demonstrating Level 5-6 thinking.
Mnemonic: C-Z-R — Close, Zoom, Re-embed. In the exam, check: Have I done all three?
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 10
In AQA English Literature, what is 'Sin 5'?
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