Part (a): comparing your text with an unseen extract — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Part (a): comparing your text with an unseen extract
What you need to know
How part (a) works: a printed extract from your studied text and an unseen extract of the same genre (prose with prose, drama with drama), each with a short introduction, compared on a theme the question names, for 20 marks in about 45 minutes, using only the two extracts.
What earns the marks: your response and the context you can infer from the extracts (AO1 and AO3) weigh twice as much as language analysis (AO2). The three bullets point to the situations the characters face, how they react, and the writers' language and techniques; context here means the social and cultural situations the extracts show, such as class, gender, age and family, not the studied text's wider background.
Comparing from the first sentence: an opening that sets the two situations side by side, comparison in every paragraph, and connectives that mark similarity and difference; an answer on only one extract cannot go above Level 3.
Reading the unseen extract quickly and freshly: its introduction, who is speaking, the situation and the turning point; in drama, stage directions, how characters speak to each other and move on stage.
The worked example: the June 2024 Animal Farm question on an alarming situation, with Boxer's collapse at the windmill as the set-text extract, practised against an unseen extract from John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), in which Richard Hannay comes home to find his visitor murdered.
A plan, and a model answer of about 600 words comparing the two extracts, with the level and mark an examiner would give and why, and a Grade 5 and a Grade 8 paragraph side by side.
The part (a) themes OCR set for each modern text in June 2025 and June 2024, and what examiners said the best answers did.
Common mistakes: writing about the rest of the studied text, bolting on background, naming features such as short sentences without saying what they do, and answering the question on another text.
