Writer's methods — An Inspector Calls — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Priestley's dramatic methods create meaning: the well-made play and the 'whodunnit' structure, dramatic irony, stage directions
and lighting, entrances and exits, the Inspector as a dramatic device, and cliffhangers at the end of each act.
Key moments: the Inspector's entrance ('massiveness, solidity and purposefulness'), his 'One person and one line of inquiry at a time', his final speech ('millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths') and the final telephone call.
Form: the well-made play turned on its own audience, the morality play (with the seven deadly sins as one reading), and Priestley's time plays; lighting from 'pink and intimate' to 'brighter and harder'; and the Inspector's name.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
