Introduction

The Question

This question tends to be approached with confidence and answered well by students. We suspect that this is because the skills are clearly signposted by the question. 

The question asks: 

Compare how the writers convey…

→ Compare = comparison

→ How the writers convey = analysis

→ COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS!

The question will then direct you to your focus. The focus will likely use the words:

• Perspectives (most common); 
• Feelings (very common, often alongside perspectives); 
• Attitudes (sometimes); 
• Thoughts (very occasionally).

Finally, it will link this focus to something concrete in the texts, like an animal or a vehicle or a person or a trip, etc.

1. Finding Links

Irritatingly, the exam inserts rarely allow for you to place the full texts side-by-side, which is the most suitable way of drawing (literally drawing) links between the two texts. Each text usually exceeds one side of A4, making such things impossible. 

However, you can still make connections. 

At MyEdSpace, we recommend the following:

1. Underline, in both texts, all occasions on which the writers express their views on the given focus; 
2. Label the general “vibe” given off by these key moments; 
3. Colour-code, with your highlighters, any general vibes either repeated or contrasted across the two texts.

2. Writing Connections

When doing comparative analysis, we take the same approach to our paragraphs that we do for English Literature when comparing anthology poems: LEADHEAD. The only difference is that we treat both of these texts as unseen, and so we do not refer to context.

LEADHEAD means the following: 

L = Link

E = Evidence 1

A = Analysis 1

D = Dissection 1

H = Hookup

E = Evidence 2

A = Analysis 2

D = Dissection 2

This is comparative analysis in its most efficient form.

The comparative element of the paragraph comes at the start and at the middle (and it does no harm to mention it again at the end). Your (L)ink lays out the synthesis of the two texts: the connection you have found. Then, your (H)ookup connects you to the second text with a linking phrase. The final (D)issection may bring them back together.

The analytical element of the paragraph is contained in the (E)(A)(D) trio that you will repeat for each text: (E)videncing your point; (A)nalysing that evidence; and (D)issecting its language use. Simple and familiar. You could also use any analytical structure you have been taught elsewhere.

Question:

Compare how the writers convey their feelings about the animals in these two texts. (16 marks)

Texts:

Text 1: An Encounter in the Wilds (1823)

The sun had scarcely breached the heavy drapery of the East African sky when we set out across the ochre plains, the air trembling with the heat of a nascent day. The grasses, dry and rustling like parchment, gave no hint of the creatures lurking within. I was but a visitor here, an intruder in a land that had known a thousand kings before me, none of them crowned by human hand.

We had been tracking spoor for hours when our guide, a grizzled Maasai elder named Muru, halted abruptly. With a hand like gnarled oak, he gestured toward a copse of fever trees ahead. I strained my eyes against the dense thickets and there, emerging with stately menace, was an elephant of such tremendous proportions that my pen scarce finds words fit to capture it.

The elephant, a gargantuan mass of rippling muscle beneath a leathery canvas of grey, threw back its head and let forth the most stirring, strident roar. The very earth seemed to reverberate with the depth of its cry, a primeval challenge to all who dared encroach upon its dominion.

For a moment, all stood still. Even the cicadas silenced their ceaseless thrum, as though Nature herself held her breath. My mount, a patient bay gelding, shivered beneath me, and I confess my own heart thudded against my ribs like a drumbeat of mortality.

Muru whispered that this was not merely a bull, but the patriarch of a dwindling herd, an ancient titan whose wrath could flatten a village and whose mercy was seldom earned. The air between us and the beast shimmered with tension, and I felt in my bones the cold, humbling truth that, in this place, humanity was neither master nor measure.

Yet the elephant, after stamping its mighty feet and flaring its ears, turned with ponderous grace and ambled back into the shelter of the trees. The encounter left me rooted in place, breathing hard, my senses stretched thin as silk across the frame of my body.

It is a peculiar thing to stand within the gaze of a creature that possesses no need of your existence. There was no malice in its display, nor fear, but rather a sovereign declaration of belonging, a proclamation that this land was older, grander, and infinitely more enduring than the ambitions of any fleeting empire.

When at last we turned back towards camp, I carried within me a new and unsettling awareness: that all our artifice, our cities, and our certainties are but mist before the sun when set against the true, unyielding majesty of the natural world.

Text 2: The Zoo of Forgotten Kings (2013)

There are places tucked behind gleaming shopping centres and suburban schools that hide darker truths than their bright signs and gift shops would suggest. On the outskirts of town lies one such place: a once-celebrated zoo, now a crumbling testament to neglect and hubris.

The afternoon was heavy with a cloying humidity, the sort that slicks the skin and dulls the senses. I entered the grounds with a vague unease, noting the peeling paint, the rust-gnawed fences, and the stink of stale water left too long in concrete pits.

I made my way past the forlorn peacocks and the listless lemurs until I reached what had once been the pride of the establishment: the elephant enclosure. It was a dismal pen of cracked stone and sagging fences, offering neither dignity nor comfort to its lone occupant.

It was a sorry sight – the once magnificent creature had now been reduced to a tremulous bag of bones, too large for the sack of grey membrane tasked with containing it.

Its skin hung in loose folds, its ears drooped like wilted leaves, and its eyes, vast and unblinking, carried the weight of an ancient grief. A sign, bleached and brittle from the sun, proclaimed it to be “Rosie – African Giant, age 48.” The irony was unbearable.

Children tossed crisps at her in an attempt to rouse some spark of animation, but Rosie only shifted her colossal frame with the reluctant grace of the truly exhausted. In the stifling heat, her slow movements seemed less like life and more like the ghost of what life had been.

I spoke briefly to a weary attendant who explained, without much ceremony, that funding had dried up years ago. Donations were scarce, government interest even scarcer. They did what they could, he said, but there was only so much that goodwill and faded memories could buy.

Leaving Rosie behind felt a little like betrayal. Her huge form grew smaller in the cracked, dusty mirror of my rear-view mirror as I drove away, but her sorrow stayed with me, a leaden knot behind my ribs.

In a world obsessed with newness and spectacle, it is easy to forget that grandeur fades and kings are left to beg at the gates of memory. But perhaps there is hope yet, in awareness, in voices raised not in idle complaint but in compassionate demand.

Perhaps Rosie and others like her might yet find green pastures beyond the wire, where no child throws litter and no soul stands unmoved at the sight of a fallen monarch.

Both writers convey their attitudes to the animals through emotive reactions to their relative conditions, with the author of Text 1 in awe of the elephant and the author of Text 2 pitying the neglected creature. In Text 1, we can see the author’s astonishment conveyed through his description of the elephant as a “gargantuan mass of rippling muscle” and its roar as “the most stirring, strident” thing, indicating that the animal’s immense size and power overwhelmed him. The string of emotive adjectives, “gargantuan”, “rippling”, “stirring”, and “strident” serve to depict his amazement quite powerfully – so much so that the elephant is no longer an animal but a “mass”. Conversely, the writer of Text 2 conveys her pity through her description of the elephant, Rosie, both as a “sorry sight” and a “tremulous bag of bones”, depicting her sadness over its current state in contrast with its former grandeur (“once magnificent”). The writer uses a similar approach – emotive adjectives like “sorry” and “tremulous” and the reduction of creature to thing (“bag of bones”) – but to achieve the polar opposite purpose: conveying her sadness.

Another attitude the writers convey, through semantic fields, is a sense of reverence for the monarchical bearings of the two elephants. In Text 1, the writer deploys a clear semantic field of royalty: “dominion”, “wrath”, “mercy”, “sovereign declaration”, “empire” and “majesty”. These abstract nouns and noun phrases carry not only a sense of royalty but also of unquestioned authority and power associated with the “patriarch” elephant, the “ancient titan”. All of these words save for “mercy” are associated with domineering behaviour (and even “mercy” is negated by the phrase “seldom earned”). Similarly, but with different outcomes, we find in Text 2 the semantic field of royalty in the lexical choices of “dignity”, “grace”, “grandeur”, and “monarch”. There is an overall sense of respect and admiration carried by this choice of language for the “African Giant”. However, crucially, all of these words are undermined; “neither dignity nor comfort”, “reluctant grace”, “grandeur fades”, and “fallen monarch” all contain negating language, meaning that these royalty-associated words become merely relics of a time forgotten – a reminder that they no longer apply – in dramatic contrast to the dominion of the elephant’s sovereignty in Text 1.

A final connection between the attitudes of the two writers towards the animals is their lingering reaction after their encounters, with Text 1’s writer left fearful and amazed, and Text 2’s left sad but hopeful. In Text 1, the writer feels an “unsettling awareness” regarding the “unyielding majesty of the natural world”. Evidently, the encounter has left him deeply moved by the significance of nature and its animals. Deeper than that, though, is the premodification of those abstract nouns “awareness” and “majesty” with the emotive adjectives “unsettling” and “unyielding” respectively – implying something disturbing about nature’s power. Conversely, in Text 2, the writer leaves the scene feeling similarly mixed but entirely different emotions: “betrayal [and] sorrow”, but also “hope [and] green pastures”. Clearly, the encounter left her reeling but determined to make a change. Notably, the abstract nouns “betrayal [and] sorrow” relate to the past tense, whilst the word “yet” applies to the “hope [and] greener pastures” idiom indicating it is located in the future – in short, the future may be brighter – and so the final image we are left with is actually more positive for Text 2 than Text 1, despite the content of both texts.

How To Approach Paper 2 Question 4

Model Answer -  Paper 2 Question 4