How avoid making your Literature Coursework harder than it needs to be.
Writing your own NEA (Non-Examined Assessment, aka Coursework) question is either incredibly liberating or absolutely terrifying — a mountain to climb even before you get going.
But there’s a good reason the question matters so much.
Your NEA doesn’t really start when you write the essay.
It starts when you write the question.
A good question gives you something interesting to argue about. A bad one can leave you trying to squeeze an argument out of a topic that never really had one in it. You are, literally, fighting yourself.
So let’s work through how to get from “I have no idea what my question should be” to a question you can actually build an essay around.
A note about specifications: I’m using a WJEC-style comparative NEA as my main example here, but the basic process is useful for other A-Level English Literature specifications too. Your own specification and your teacher’s requirements always take priority.
I’m going to use Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) as my example texts.
If you haven’t read them, you really should. They’re both short, which is useful because my first piece of advice is to reread your NEA texts. Ideally, at least twice.
And if you’re still choosing your texts when you really ought to be getting on with this … well. You may want to get moving.
1. What (if anything) has annoyed you about your books?
Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool
Art thou to break into this woman’s mood,
Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!
1 Henry IV (I.iii)1
You might be in the great position where something has really got under your skin about one or both of your books, to the point that it’s pretty much all you want to talk about.
Strangely, it does seem easier to write about things that annoy you.
Often it’s something you think is unfair — for example, how the female characters are treated (or act).
In my example texts, the thing most on my mind today is how the parents in both affect, maybe infect, their children’s lives.
That’s useful.
An emotional reaction is often a very good place to start thinking.
You don’t need to turn it into an academic-sounding idea yet. You just need to notice what you keep thinking about.
2. Have you thought about the books’ themes?
What a piece of work is a man!
Hamlet (II.ii)
At GCSE, I might talk about a theme being the subject of a text, or use the question:
“What is this REALLY about?”
At A Level, I want to go a bit further and think about what I call universal themes.
By this, I mean emotions, situations, relationships and events which many, most or all of us will experience in our lives. They are, in fact, part of what it means to be alive and human.
Some examples:
- Emotions: rage, jealousy, loneliness, ambition
- Situations: threat, danger, conflict, betrayal, temptation, moral dilemmas and choices in general
- Relationships: parents and children, lovers, platonic friendships, siblings, relationships of power
- Events: birth, death, weddings, break-ups, wars
In my example, I’m going to choose what has been getting on my nerves: relationships between parents and children.
IMPORTANT: a text can be about many themes. Don’t worry about finding the theme. You’re looking for something that gives you an interesting way into the texts.
3. What messages do you take away from your reading?
Spake he so doubtfully, thou couldst not feel his meaning?
The Comedy of Errors (II.i)
Now we want to go one step further.
It’s not enough to say that a text is about parents and children. We want to be able to interpret what each writer has to say about parents and children.
Let’s take music as an example.
Most pop music is about love. That’s the theme.
But look at the very different messages sent by these two famous songs:
- “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.”, Aretha Franklin (1967)
- “Stand by Your Man”, Tammy Wynette (1968)
Even if you don’t know the songs, the titles give you a pretty good clue about the different messages about relationships.
Try this formula to help articulate your ideas:
“When it comes to X, the writer’s basically saying Y.”
Where X is the theme and
Y is the message.
And remember: this is your interpretation.
There is no single right or wrong answer waiting to be discovered. What matters is that you have an interpretation which you can plausibly back up with evidence from the text.
You’ll need to do this for each book.
OK, here are mine:
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys‘ message about parent/child relationships is the bleak idea that parents choose partners for their children based on their own selfish desires and interests.
and
In On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s message about parent/child relationships is that parental dysfunction can have lasting, ruinous effects on a child’s life.
Can you see how this is, in fact, going to become the blueprint for the introduction to my NEA?
4. Which are the best episodes in each novel which prove my points?
one man in his time plays many parts
As You Like It (II.vii)
Remember, earlier I said you can pretty much express any opinion.
You might not agree with the ones I’ve given above.
But here’s the key, and a cornerstone of all my teaching and tutoring:
You can say what you want as long as you can plausibly back it up.
So now you need to find the evidence.
Think of three or four parts of each text which support what you’ve just said about it.
You might start with something as simple as this:
| Text A | Text B |
| The bit where… | The bit where… |
| The bit where… | The bit where… |
| The bit where… | The bit where… |
| The bit where… | The bit where… |
You’re looking for comparable material, not necessarily identical scenes.
Stuck?
Go back to your list of themes.
For example, if you want to write about female characters, you could compare:
- how each character is introduced to the reader
- the major events and choices which affect them
- the outcome for each character
The important thing is that you are now testing your interpretation against the actual texts.
If your supposed “message” doesn’t survive contact with the evidence, that’s useful too.
Change your interpretation.
That’s what reading is for.
5. My teacher says my question needs a critical quotation — can you help?
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
Hamlet (III.ii)
Absolutely. And it can be a good idea.
What are we doing here?
Basically, you’re going to introduce a statement related to your theme which you can agree or disagree with in your coursework.
There are several ways to do this.
You could formulate the statement yourself. For example:
“Parenting is the most important job in the world, but no-one ever gets it right.”
Or you could find a useful critical statement or quotation about your theme.
I’m going to use something rather more memorable by Philip Larkin, from “This Be The Verse”:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Yep, that’s right.
I did use that word.
Welcome to A Level.
The point isn’t the shock value, though. It’s that Larkin gives us a clear, arguable proposition about parents and their effects on their children.
And that’s exactly what we need.
Now we can write the question!
Ask me what question thou canst possible,
And I will answer unpremeditated.
2 Henry VI (I.ii)
Let’s bring everything together.
The ideal question for this spec should be worded so that it:
- gives you something genuinely interesting to talk about;
- requires you to make an argument rather than simply describe the texts;
- gives you plenty of relevant evidence to work with;
- allows you to compare your texts;
- and gives you opportunities to demonstrate the Assessment Objectives required for your particular NEA.
I colour-code the AOs in my own resources and tuition, so here’s what that looks like in practice:
Colour Coding?
AO1 – AO2 – AO3 – AO4 – AO5
And here’s my question:
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
In the light of these lines by Philip Larkin, compare the ways in which Jean Rhys and Ian McEwan write about parent/child relationships in your chosen works, having due regard to the contexts in which their novels were written and received.
Notice what we’ve done.
We started with something that annoyed me.
We identified a theme.
We worked out what each writer seemed to be saying about that theme.
We found evidence.
We found a critical statement which gave us something to argue with.
And then we turned all of that into a question I already know the answer to.
The question isn’t an arbitrary hurdle standing between me and my essay.
It has been built from my thinking about the texts.
Let’s recap
That strain again!
Twelfth Night (I.i)
Using my example as a template, you now have a draft question to submit to your teacher and, where required, through your school’s approval process.
But there’s something else you’ve done.
You have shaped the question yourself to make it something you have plenty to talk about.
And you might not realise it yet, but you also have the basic skeleton of your essay plan.
Let’s look again, bringing together what we did earlier:
INTRODUCTION
What do the two writers say about the theme? What is your overall interpretation?
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO4
PART 1
Text A → compare → Text B
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO5
PART 2
Text A → compare → Text B
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO5
PART 3
Text A → compare → Text B
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO5
PART 4, if you have enough material
Text A → compare → Text B
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO5
CONCLUSION
What have you ultimately shown about the question?
AO1 · AO2 · AO3 · AO4
The exact balance and requirements will depend on your specification, but the principle is the important bit.
A good question gives your essay somewhere to go.
So before you start worrying about writing thousands of words, make sure you’ve got a question that gives those words something useful to do.
Any questions?
You know where to ask.
I’d love to hear from you.
- all Shakespeare quotations take from https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org ↩︎
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