How to make your NEA coursework question work for YOU as well as your exam board.
Your A Level English Literature NEA can be a brilliant experience, or a daunting one. By the end of this post, you'll have a draft question for your A Level NEA and an outline of your plan too!
NOTE: I’m using Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) [WSS] and On Chesil Beach (2007) [OCB] as my example texts, because that's what my tutees are using. If you haven’t read them, you really should. And if you’re still choosing your texts, these two excellent novels have the real advantage of being short (under 175 pages each)! That’s important because my advice is to reread each text at least twice.
Seven Steps to Success when beginning your A Level English Literature Coursework ...
Step 1: has anything annoyed you about your books?
Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool / Art thou to break into this woman's mood,/ Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own! 1 Henry IV (I.iii)
You might be in the great position where something has really got under your skin about one or both of your books, to the point that it’s pretty much all you want to talk about. This might be, for example, how the female characters are treated (or act).
In my example, I’m going to suggest that the thing most on my mind at the moment is how in OCB Edward and Florence’s parents affected, maybe infected, their children’s lives. In WSS (a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre) Rochester and Bertha would never have married without parental interference.
Step 2: consider the Themes
What a piece of work is a man! Hamlet (II.ii)
At GCSE, I might talk about a theme being the subject, or use the question, ‘What is this REALLY about?’
At A Level, I want to go a bit further and talk about ‘universal themes’. What I mean by this is that we’re talking about emotions, situations, relationships, events which many / most / all of us (that’s the ‘universal’ bit) will experience in our lives. They are, in fact, what it means to be alive and human. Some examples for you:
Emotions: rage, jealousy, loneliness, ambition
Situations: threat, danger, conflict, betrayal, temptation, moral dilemmas in general
Relationships: parents and children, lovers, platonic friendships, siblings, relationships of power
Events: birth, death, weddings, breakups, wars
In my example, I am going to choose what has been getting on my nerves, above: relationships between parents and children.
IMPORTANT: Bear in mind that a text can be about many themes.
Step 3: think about Messages
He hath some message to deliver us. Titus Andronicus (IV.ii)
Here, you want to be able to interpret what each writer has to say on the theme. Let’s take music as an example. Most pop music is about love. That’s the theme. But look at the quite different messages sent by these two:
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Aretha Franklin (1967)
Stand by Your Man Tammy Wynette (1968)
Spend a few moments thinking about that … no, really!
Try this formula:
“When it comes to X, the writer’s basically saying Y.”
Where X is the theme, and Y is the message.
IMPORTANT: this is your opinion. There is no right/wrong answer. It’s what you think, and believe you can back up (see below).
You’’ll need to do this for each book. OK, here are mine:
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ message about parent/child relationships is the bleak idea that parents choose partners for their children based on their own selfish desires and interests.
In On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s message about parent/child relationships is that parental dysfunction can have lasting, ruinous effects on a child’s life.
Can you see how this, in fact, is going to be the blueprint for the introduction to my NEA?
Step 4: select the parts of each novel that back you up
You know your places well All's Well That Ends Well (III.i)
Remember, earlier I said you could pretty much express ANY opinion. You might not agree with the ones I have given you, above. But here’s the key - again, you can say what you want as long as you can back it up. So, now you need to think of three to four parts of each text which support what you said about it.
Text A Text B
The bit where … The bit where …
The bit where … The bit where …
The bit where … The bit where …
The bit where … The bit where …
Step 5: Find/develop a suitable quotation
Your speech is passion / But, pray you, stir no embers up Antony & Cleopatra (II.ii)
What are we doing here? Basically, you’re going to introduce a statement related to the theme which you can agree or disagree with in your coursework. Two ways to do this:
you could make something up: for example, I could use something like: “Parenting is the most important job in the world, but no-one ever gets it right”
More flash, perhaps, is to find a useful quotation about the theme said by someone important/famous - an internet search could be very useful here. I’m going to go for something by Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’:
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.”
Yep, that’s right, I did … we're in Sixth Form now!
Step 6: write your question
Ask me what question thou canst possible, And I will answer unpremeditated 2 Henry VI (I.ii)
Let’s bring the question together. The ideal question should be worded in a way that it gives you something to talk about, and forces you to cover the necessary AOs for the task.
Here we go - my question is colour-coded (AO1, AO2, AO3, AO4, AO5), and the underlined words are standard enough for you to use in your own version.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to, but they do.”
In the light of these lines by Philip Larkin, compare the ways in which Jean Rhys and Ian McEwan write about parent/child relationships in your chosen works, having due regard to the contexts in which their novels were written and received.
Step 7 - Recap and Plan
it will be an excellent stratagem. 2 Henry IV (II.iv)
A - you have a draft question to submit to your teacher, then the exam board. You yourself have shaped the question to make it something you have something to talk about
B - you might not think so, but you also have the basic skeleton of your essay plan.
Let’s look again, bringing together what we did earlier:
INTRO: In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ message about parent/child relationships is the bleak idea that parents choose partners for their children based on their own selfish desires and interests. [COMPARISON] In On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s message about parent/child relationships is that parental dysfunction can have lasting, ruinous effects on a child’s life.
Text A Text B
Part 1 The bit where … vs The bit where … AO1, AO2, AO3, AO5
Part 2 The bit where … vs The bit where … AO1, AO2, AO3, AO5
Part 3 The bit where … vs The bit where … AO1, AO2, AO3, AO5
Part 4 The bit where … vs The bit where … AO1, AO2, AO3, AO5
CONCLUSION: sum up what you have found.
Boom!
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Abel Guerrero has been teaching since 2013, specialising in English Literature and A Level in particular.
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