Writer's methods — DNA — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Kelly's form, structure and language create meaning: four sections that repeat the same settings, Jan and Mark as a chorus, Phil's silence against Leah's monologues,
dialogue that sounds like real talk, telling stage directions, black comedy, and a play written for young people to perform.
Structure: four sections over a few weeks, each moving from a street to a field to a wood and back to a field, three of four scenes and a last of two, with ensemble scenes in the wood and duologues elsewhere, so that the play's shape repeats like its dialogue.
Setting: unnamed outdoor places with no adults, from the public street to the hidden wood with its mix of 'threat and enchantment', where the group hides what it has done.
Jan and Mark as a chorus who open every section, and events reported rather than shown, from the bullying to the planting of the DNA, by unreliable witnesses.
Phil's silence against Leah's monologues: stage directions such as 'Phil shrugs' and 'No answer' that make silence dramatic, and the reversal when Leah falls silent.
Dialogue that sounds like real talk: repetition, interruption, unfinished sentences, a 'verbal tennis match' of mirrored lines, and terse exchanges that show how hard it is to admit the truth.
Black comedy: a play that moves 'between the mundane and the horrific', a 'jet-black comedy' in one critic's words, and Kelly's refusal to call it a comedy or a tragedy because plays now 'can just be'.
Written for young performers: the Connections commission, a large cast whose names and genders can change, a bare stage and projections in the first production, and a title that points both to forensic evidence and to behaviour that may be 'just in us all'.
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.
