The unseen text: reading a passage you have never seen

Read the questions first

In the reading time, read the questions before the texts. It sounds backwards and it is the single biggest change you can make: knowing what you are looking for turns a second read into a search instead of another read.

Then read each text once, quickly, for what it is about and who is speaking. Do not annotate yet. A passage covered in underlining before you know what the question wants is a passage you now have to read a third time.

On the second pass, mark only what answers a question you have already read. Two or three marks per text is enough. What you are looking for is the bit you would point at if somebody asked you why the text makes you feel what it makes you feel.

The mark count is the shape

A two-mark question wants a point and a piece of evidence. A three-mark question wants a point, evidence, and what the evidence does. A five-mark question wants two or three of those, connected, with a sentence at the start that answers the question directly.

So write the number of ideas the marks ask for and then stop. Time in this section is tight, and the five-mark question at the end is where the marks are - arriving at it with four minutes left because you wrote a paragraph for a two-mark question is the commonest way to lose them.

Answer in the first sentence. Not a preamble about the text, not a restatement of the question. The sentence that answers it, then the evidence that supports it.

Naming a technique is not the answer

Every unseen answer has the same three moving parts: what the composer does, how you can tell, and what it does to a reader. The technique is the middle part, and it is the smallest of the three.

So the sentence is not this text uses imagery. It is that the writer makes the house feel abandoned, which you can see in a short quoted phrase, and the effect is that the reader expects nobody to come back. The technique gets named in passing because naming it is how you describe the evidence precisely, not because naming it earns anything.

Quote briefly. Two or three words is usually enough, and a long quotation is often there instead of an explanation rather than as well as one. The marker can see the text; what they cannot see is what you think it is doing.

• Make a claim about the text that answers the question.
• Quote a few words, not a sentence, unless the question needs it.
• Say what it does to a reader.
• Name the technique inside that sentence, not instead of it.

Different kinds of text, same method

The section mixes prose, poetry, images, non-fiction and sometimes a transcript or a screenshot, and the method does not change. What changes is where the evidence lives.

In an image, the evidence is what is in the frame and what is not: what is central, what is in shadow, where your eye goes first, what has been left out. In a poem it may be a line break or a word that does not fit the register around it. In a speech it may be a pronoun - who the word we is being used to include.

If the question compares two texts, say something about both in every paragraph. An answer that does text one and then text two has described two texts rather than compared them, and comparison was the whole question.

Write in your own words

The words you use to describe an effect matter more here than anywhere else in the paper, because there is no prepared material to fall back on. Plain and specific beats elaborate every time.

Avoid the sentences that could be written about any text: this engages the reader, this creates imagery, this allows the responder to understand. They say nothing, they take up the line you needed, and a marker has read them three hundred times that day.

Say what it actually does. It makes the street sound empty. It puts you in the position of the person being spoken to. It slows down at exactly the moment you expect it to speed up. That is a real observation, and it is what a mark is for.

Where it usually goes wrong

Five habits. None of them requires knowing more about English than you already do.

• Reading the texts before the questions.
• Writing a paragraph for a two-mark question and running out of time.
• Naming a technique and stopping there.
• Quoting a whole sentence when three words would do.
• Writing about one text and then the other on a comparison question.

What to practise next

Do the unseen section of four past papers under time, and only that section - twenty minutes each. It is the one part of the paper you can practise in short bursts, and it improves faster than anything else in the course.

Then take one of your answers and cross out every sentence that could have been written about a different text. What is left is the answer you actually made, and its length will tell you how much of your time was going somewhere else.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Have a go before you open them - reading an answer you have not tried to give is the version of this that does nothing.