Using quotations well is one of the clearest markers of a top-band answer, and not just in Literature essays. Whenever you write about how a writer uses language, whether it’s a poem, a novel or an unseen passage in an English Language reading paper, the same skill decides your mark. Many students quote too much, embed it clumsily and then fail to analyse it. The result reads like a list of evidence rather than an argument. Here’s how to make your quotations earn marks.
Why PEE Isn’t Enough
Many students are taught PEE (Point, Evidence, Explain) or a variant of it. It’s a reasonable starting structure, but at IGCSE it tends to produce mechanical writing. “Explain” often becomes “this shows that…” followed by a paraphrase of the quotation, not genuine analysis of it. Examiners see this pattern constantly, and it doesn’t impress them.
In my classes, students use What, How, Why instead:
- What is the writer showing or suggesting?
- How do they do it? This is where the quotation goes, and where you zoom in on specific words
- Why did they make that choice? What effect does it have on the reader?
It sounds simple, but it moves students from describing a text to analysing it. The aim isn’t to follow a formula; it’s to build an argument and support it with evidence you analyse closely.
Short Quotations Beat Long Ones
The longer your quotation, the less you can say about it. A two- or three-word quotation can be embedded naturally in a sentence and then unpacked in detail: word choice, connotation, imagery, sound, tone. A ten-word quotation is hard to embed, hard to analyse fully, and suggests you’re not sure which words are actually doing the work.
If you find yourself copying out more than a line of poetry or two sentences of prose, ask: which three words here are doing the most work? Then quote only those.
Embed Quotations Naturally
Quotations should flow from your sentence, not interrupt it. Compare these two responses to the opening of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”:
Clunky: Owen shows that the soldiers are tired. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.” This shows that the soldiers are exhausted.
Embedded: From the opening line, Owen strips the soldiers of any heroism: “bent double” and “knock-kneed”, these young men move “like old beggars”, aged before their time and reduced to the kind of people society ignores.
The second version uses three short quotations, woven into the sentence, and starts analysing them straight away. The analysis sits in the same sentence as the evidence, not in a separate one that repeats it.
Analyse the Words, Not the General Idea
The phrase “this shows that…” nearly always leads to a general observation instead of close analysis. Ask yourself instead: why this word? What does it suggest? What would be lost if the writer had chosen a different one?
This matters just as much in an English Language paper. Imagine an unseen passage describing a city “choking” on traffic. Using What, How, Why:
What: the writer presents the city as overwhelmed by traffic. How: the verb “choking” personifies the city as a body struggling to breathe. Why: it turns congestion from an inconvenience into something that threatens life, so the reader feels the danger of the pollution, not just the delay.
One word, fully explored, says more than a paragraph of summary.
One Quotation, Fully Analysed, Beats Three Summarised
This is the most important principle. Examiners at IGCSE are looking for depth of analysis, not coverage. One quotation you genuinely unpack, considering word choice, imagery, form and effect, will earn more marks than three quotations each followed by “this shows…”. Knowing which quotation is worth that depth is a skill we practise in every lesson.
For more on close reading, see my posts on how to analyse a novel extract and how to revise for IGCSE English.
At Thorogood English, close reading and quotation analysis are practised in every lesson, until they become instinctive rather than mechanical. Find out more about my live classes, or join the waiting list for January 2027.
