Any advice for the Tempest OCR?

Zara If that's the case, it sounds like the thing you need to work on is AO1! You need to make sure you're saying something interesting and argumentative about the texts, rather than just saying something that anyone else would say. A big part of that is asking yourself good sub-questions and defining/categorising the words in the question for part b. For part a, it means making your own meaning up from the extract!

Lots of people jump in with their gut reactions and immediately start talking about the most obvious reading of the question. The problem with that is OCR has explicitly said it loves when people pick apart the question and show that they understand the words in the statement themselves are nuanced. So let's take this statement for an example:

'A play in which everyone is performing'

A student who would get lower grades might automatically start to talk about the most obvious versions of performance. An A or A student would ask 'What do we mean* when we say performance?' and spend a little bit of their planning time picking that apart. They might come up with things like this:

• Performing meaning your inner thoughts and feelings aren't reflected by the way you act externally.
• Performing meaning acting in ways which are supposed to entertain and benefit other people. Like the 'show' aspect.
• Performing referring to gender – Judith Butler and gender performativity.

Then you have three really nice paragraphs you can talk about that show you've wrangled the question! You'll get a lot of your nuance from there. If you're like, 'Yeah people perform gender, but they don't always act for the benefit of other people', then you've basically answered in a much more nuanced way that picks apart the question!

Then for extra points, you're going to make more categories. Does everyone perform? Or are their certain types of people who perform more than others? Men? Women? Is it more about people with power vs people who don't have it? That's going to add more nuance that's going to make your argument stronger.

Once you've done that, everything else you need to do (e.g. quotes, analysis, AO5) will be much more nuanced. Plus, you might have noticed that the paragraphs themselves lend to different AO5 really well! The idea of the difference between inner and outer aligns really well with Freud's idea of the Id, Ego and Superego, for example. So it works really well for a psychoanalytic reading. Of course, gender for the last one!

For part a, you've got to be able to do this yourself. What is the text trying to teach us or warn us about in this particular extract? Split that into themes! Talk about the themes one by one, making sure to mention language, structure and form!