Top Ten Tips For Teaching Textual Analysis
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→Top Ten Tips for the Textual Analysis Exam
 Prioritise skills over knowledge – candidates need to know some
technical terms (e.g. camerawork, editing, layout) but what is crucial
is the ability to apply them in new situations and to link them to
connotative effects
 Candidates need practical experience in the same medium as their
textual analysis (especially editing for moving image texts and
photographic framing and composition and page layout for print texts)
 Practice note-taking skills for textual analyses
 Answer all four questions, it helps in this if answers for question 1 are
kept as short as possible
 Answer all parts of the question (the second two marks were
sometimes lost in question 2 on the 2004 higher tier papers)
 Question 4 is the only question that requires references to texts
other than the extract
 Study genre texts for question 4 that exemplify generic conventions
and use these examples in the exam
 Pick two very similar genre texts and one contrasting one, candidates
should know which is which
 Discuss genre texts as a whole (e.g., discuss how the narrative
structure of a moving image text fits its generic conventions, or
discuss the different sections of a print text), not just an extract

Know generic audience pleasures and how they apply to particular
texts