Question 2: language

Question 2 points you to a short section of the source and asks how the writer uses language to describe something. It suggests you could write about:

• words and phrases;
• language features and techniques;
• sentence forms.

It tests AO2, is worth 8 marks, and you should spend about 10 minutes on it.

1. Box the lines you're given, and underline 3–4 interesting words or phrases.
2. For each one, write a short paragraph: quotation, method (the technique or word class), effect on the reader.
3. Zoom in on single words and their connotations.
4. Link your points to the question: how does each choice help describe this place or person?

Two or three detailed paragraphs score more than six thin ones.

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down

from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with

loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the

gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon,

5outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to

Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched

the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past,

one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly

trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they

10curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped

noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the

track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.

In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough

grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip

15that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already

abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred

fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red

sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just

beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of

20Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the

sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners

were being turned up.

Look in detail at lines 13 to 22 of the source. How does the writer use language to describe the landscape?

Lawrence describes the landscape as sick and dying. The adjectives ‘dreary and forsaken’ suggest a place that has been abandoned, and even the fowls have ‘abandoned their run’. The simile ‘flames like red sores licking its ashy sides’ makes the burning pit-bank seem diseased, as if the land itself is wounded by the mine. The verb ‘licking’ also personifies the flames as an animal feeding on it. The ‘stagnant light’ suggests that nothing here moves or changes. Together these choices create a semantic field of decay, presenting the mining village as a bleak, unhealthy place to live.

The top level (7–8 marks) needs perceptive, detailed analysis:

• analysing the effects of language, not just naming techniques;
• a judicious (well-chosen) range of short quotations;
• accurate use of subject terminology.

Lower levels describe effects simply, or just spot features. The model answer reaches higher by zooming in on single words like ‘licking’ and linking choices into one idea: a dying landscape.