Commenting on Passages & Speeches

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Paper 1-Passages for Comment Steps to comment on a passage In English language the "ability to read with understanding written material in a variety of form, and to comment on its effectiveness" can help us explore them and question why they exist in the first place. The passage must be analysed carefully and points made. The usual structure for a simple commentry goes something like this: 1. Identifying the genre of the passage, i.e. [Fiction] mystery, historical, supernatural, romance, science fiction, war, human interest, adventure, crime, or [Non-fiction] biography, autobiography, travel, history, geography... 2. Identifying the writer's purpose - why he/she wrote it, i.e. to persuade, to ridicule, to inform, to humour, to entertain, to scare, to offer a point of view and contrasting points of view... 3. Identify the tone of the passage, i.e. persuasive, critical, sarcastic, serious, formal, informal, confidential, etc. Tone is conveyed by the choice of words and the way they are put together. A passage may pass through several tones of voice, especially is it is telling a story or describing a series of characters, or a situation unfolding between them. 4. Identifying vocabulary. Pick out particular words or phrases which help to arive to a conclusion of the writer's purpose. How are these words/phrases effective in determing the purpose of the writer? 5. Identifying figures of speech. The most commonly used figures of speech are a simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, contrast, oxymoron, hyperbole/exaggeration, euphemism, rhetoric, repetition, pun, irony, idiom.... It is not enough to just say a word/phrase is a certain figure of speech. You must explain how it is effective in its use. To do so you must learn the effects that different figures of speech have and then analyse the passage according to that. 6. Identifying the
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