Writer's methods — Romeo and Juliet — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Shakespeare's form, structure and language create meaning: tragedy, the sonnets of the Prologue and the lovers' first meeting,
verse and prose, soliloquies, dramatic irony, oxymoron, light and dark imagery, foreshadowing and the compressed time scheme.
The Prologue and the shared sonnet, blank verse, rhyming couplets and prose, and who speaks which.
Oxymoron, light and dark imagery, and foreshadowing such as 'death-mark'd love'.
Dramatic irony, comic relief from the Nurse, Mercutio and the servants, and the time scheme that crams the action into a few days.
OCR's question on this play is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the play elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the play, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts as the play shows it, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
