Writer's methods — Anita and Me — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Syal's form, structure and language create meaning: a first-person narrator who recalls her childhood with an adult's hindsight, humour, digressions and stories within the story,
Black Country dialect and Punjabi in the dialogue, vivid imagery of people and places, the bildungsroman, and a semi-autobiographical novel drawn from Syal's own childhood.
The first-person narrator: Meena aged nine to eleven, told by an adult looking back, so that a child's words ('scabby') sit beside an adult's ('my contentment made me benevolent').
Humour: comic exaggeration and timing, as in the 'near death experience' of a stuck sausage and the capitals of 'An Exam Tomorrow', which make painful moments bearable.
Dialect and code-switching: Black Country speech ('Yow coming, then?', 'wench'), Punjabi words, and the aunties' and uncles' mix of English and Punjabi, and what each voice says about belonging.
Imagery: similes and metaphors for people ('like a friendly potato', 'like a burnished planet', 'shrivel like slugs under salt'), with sibilance, alliteration and short, punchy words.
Physical reactions to racism, such as feeling 'punched' and 'spat at', which make prejudice felt rather than explained.
Structure: the bildungsroman's stages from exposition to resolution, digressions and stories within the story, and a narrative that moves between life inside and outside Meena's family.
A semi-autobiographical novel: Syal's childhood in a Black Country village reshaped into fiction, full of the songs and television of the time.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
