Feature Spotting

Feature spotting is a BAD thing to do in your essays. It’s when you pick out the devices or terminology that you can find in a text without analysing what the text producer is doing.

It’s a bit like doing Where’s Wally with literary devices. You’re not saying anything useful about the device or explaining why the writer might use it. Instead, you’re basically just saying, “Oh look! There’s a metaphor!”

This is not going to get you the marks in your exam because it doesn’t fit any of the important English assessment objectives. It doesn’t work for GCSE AOs, let alone A-level ones!

Feature spotting is a really easy trap to fall into. However, fixing it is also a really easy way to boost your grades! Once you know what to spot, you’ll see how much fixing your feature spotting will improve your work.

What Does Feature Spotting Look Like?

Feature spotting is quite easy to spot once you know what to look out for! Let’s look at two examples.

“Wilfred Owen says that the soldiers are ‘bent double like old beggars under sacks’, which is a simile. X

In this first example, the student is only telling us that Wilfred Owen used a simile. They don’t do anything else with the terminology they choose to use. This would be feature spotting.

Don’t do this.

Here’s a good example of how to use terminology.

“Wilfred Owen uses a simile to compare the soldiers to ‘old beggars’, which highlights how helpless and unhealthy they are. As his implied reader has never been to war, the simile also acts as imagery, helping them to imagine the horror of a scene they have never had to face.” ?

In this second example, the student is explaining why the simile is so important to the poem. They use the simile to make a point about what Owen is trying to say. This is not feature spotting, as it is clear that they have identified the terminology for a reason.

How to Avoid It

There are three main issues that cause students to fall into the trap of feature spotting. If you want to avoid it in your own work, you need to fix those issues.

The first issue is about not having an argument in your essay. If you don’t have an argument, you’ll just list endless things that you’ve noticed about the text without connecting them all. If you’re doing that, it’s really easy to accidentally feature spot.

So, look at the essay question. Ask yourself the question, “What message is the text producer trying to give their text receiver?” Then, ask, “How does this device help them to do that?”

The second issue is common with grade 8-9 or A-A* students: trying to write down every single thing you’ve revised. After all, there’s so much to say! You’ve learnt so many fancy terms that you want to show off! So, you’re likely to blurt out everything you know.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to this one. You’ve just got to get used to letting go. You don’t get to show off every single skill in maths or science, either.

Finally, you might feature spot if you’ve never asked yourself one crucial question: why did the writer choose that technique or device and not another one?

Once you’ve worked out your answer to that question, all the feature spotting will melt away – as long as you remember to explain it in your essay.

At A-level, we do something called “Textual Intervention”: changing certain words in the text to see how that changes the meaning. Try it out! It’s the best vaccine against feature spotting!