Unseen Prose

The last thirty marks of Paper 2A come from a prose passage you have never read, printed with a single sentence of context above it. There is no set text, no author to have revised, and often no way of telling from the passage itself whether the book it came from is a hundred years old or five. What is being measured is exactly what the specification says: your ability to closely analyse the variety of ways writers create meanings and influence the reader.

This section is the closest thing in the qualification to a pure reading test, and it is also the one candidates most often answer as though it were a comprehension exercise. This lesson shows the difference. You will see a practice passage written for the purpose taken apart in full, learn which prose methods are always available whatever the passage is about, and see the same observation written at three different levels of the mark scheme so that the gap between them stops being mysterious.