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What's covered, in curriculum order. Titles and summaries are free to browse; the full section, with worked examples, unlocks with a free account.
1. Choosing and Scoping a Literary Study
The two routes the Literary Study essay can take, single-text analysis or comparative, and how scope shapes what the essay can actually cover well.
2. Thesis and Line of Argument
What a genuine thesis statement commits an Advanced Higher essay to, and how a line of argument is sustained rather than merely repeated.
3. Using Critical Context and Wider Reading
How critical context (biographical, historical, or published critical readings) should support the student's own argument rather than replace it.
4. Structuring the Comparative Essay
The two structural approaches to comparing texts, text-by-text and point-by-point, and why point-by-point is usually the stronger choice.
5. Evaluation and a Genuinely Personal Response
The difference between describing what a text does and evaluating how successfully it does it, and what makes a personal response "genuinely" independent.
6. Textual Analysis: A Different Kind of Reading Paper
How the unseen Textual Analysis paper differs from RUAE: no set questions to guide the response, and its own single overall task instead.
7. Analysing Structure Independently in Unseen Poetry
Identifying stanza shifts, volta, and structural patterning in an unseen poem without a question pointing to where they occur.
8. Narrative Technique in Unseen Prose
Narrative distance and unreliable narration in an unseen extract, identified and evaluated without a set question naming the technique.
9. Symbolism and Independent Synthesis
Building a single coherent overall reading of an unseen text's central concern from several separately identified techniques.
10. Formulating a Research Question
What makes a dissertation research question workable: specific, arguable, and answerable within the word count, unlike a broad essay title.
11. Structuring a Sustained Argument Over an Extended Piece
Why a dissertation's greater length needs its own explicit signposting and internal summaries to hold the argument together across many more paragraphs than a single essay.
12. Integrating and Citing Secondary Critical Sources
Why secondary sources must be cited, and the difference between a source that supports the student's own argument and one that simply replaces it.
13. Evaluating and Refining the Dissertation's Own Argument
Testing a draft argument against counter-evidence before submission, and what a dissertation's conclusion is specifically required to do.
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