Recap
Evidence is what you quote or describe from the poem; composition is how clearly you organise and express your argument. Evidence is effective when your commentary explains the link to the claim, and sufficient when its quantity and quality support the whole line of reasoning. Every quotation should have a job: to illustrate, clarify, exemplify, associate, amplify or qualify. Choose the smallest unit that carries the point, spread evidence across the poem, embed quotations in your own sentences and keep to the present tense. Developing an interpretation is recursive, so revise your claim if the evidence points elsewhere. The full explanation, with a model essay on Blake’s “London”, is in the study guide.
Key relationships
| Idea | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|
| Size of quotation | A word or a phrase; a line at most |
| Placement | Embedded in your sentence, followed by commentary |
| Line breaks | Slash with spaces: “line one / line two” |
| Tense | Present: “the speaker hears” |
| Voice | “the speaker” for the voice in the poem; “the poet” for choices of craft |
| Spread | Beginning, middle and end, as the claim needs |
| Accuracy | Copy exactly; never invent a quotation |
| Jobs | Illustrate, clarify, exemplify, associate, amplify, qualify |
Suggested 40-minute plan: 5 read and annotate, 5 thesis and plan, 25 write, 5 revise.
Conditions to remember
- Evidence without commentary is decoration.
- Quantity alone is not sufficiency; relevance and spread matter.
- Mechanical errors that interfere with meaning limit the top score for evidence and commentary.
- In a timed essay no citation style is needed, but quoted words must be clearly marked.
Mistakes to avoid
- Pasting a whole stanza and analysing none of it.
- Using the same job for every quotation, so the essay only repeats itself.
- Shifting tense mid-paragraph.
- Treating the speaker and the poet as the same person without reason.
- Leaving no time to reread.
Worked mini-example
Weak: pasting six lines of “London” and writing “this shows London is sad”. Strong: “The repetition of ‘chartered’ suggests the city has turned even its landscape into property.” The strong version quotes one word, gives it a job (illustrate), embeds it in a sentence, explains the effect, and ties it to the claim about confinement. The evidence is smaller and the commentary is larger, which is the balance to aim for.
Quick self-check
- Name three of the six jobs evidence can do.
- What makes evidence sufficient?
- How do you show a line break in a quotation inside a sentence?
- Why should evidence be spread across the poem?
- What does “recursive” mean for developing an interpretation?
Answers.
- Any three of: illustrate, clarify, exemplify, associate, amplify, qualify.
- Its quantity and quality together give apt support to the line of reasoning.
- With a slash and a space on each side.
- A claim about the whole poem needs support from more than one part of it.
- You can start from reasoning and look for evidence, or start from evidence and form the reasoning, and you move back and forth, revising as you go.
Next: the practice questions.