Example 1 — Building a thesis from a guiding question

Guiding question: How does the writer use structure to convey the speaker's relationship with loss?

Three attempts:

Weak. "This poem is about someone whose mother has died and they are sorting through her things."

Subject matter, not argument — and note it asserts a death the poem never states.

Better but still weak. "The writer uses enjambment, repetition and imagery to convey the speaker's relationship with loss."

A list of devices that would fit almost any poem. It has no claim in it.

A thesis. "The poem's structure enacts a double movement: it compresses a household into a pocketable list, then, in its final stanza, refuses that compression by returning the list to its original words — so that the form performs both the tidying-away of grief and its failure to stay tidied."

Why the third works. It is arguable, it is specific to this poem, and it names a structural pattern rather than a device. Everything the essay does afterwards can be tested against it.

Example 2 — A paragraph reaching criterion B

Analysing the poem's final stanza:

The poem's closing gesture is a return. The objects listed in the opening tercet — "six teaspoons, the good scissors" — reappear at the close in almost identical words, but the watch has changed tense: "had not been wound since March" becomes "has not been wound". The shift from past perfect to present perfect quietly abolishes the intervening time. In the first stanza the unwound watch was a fact about the past; by the end it is a fact that is still going on. The repetition therefore does the opposite of what repetition usually does in an elegy — instead of conferring the calm of ritual, it demonstrates that nothing has been concluded. The speaker's claim to have reduced the house to "a page" that "fitted easily" is undone by the poem's own unwillingness to leave the objects alone, and the reader, arriving at a list they have already read, is made to perform the same failure to move on.

What earns the marks here. The observation is small — one auxiliary verb changing tense — and the paragraph builds an argument from it. It names the effect on the reader, and it connects back to the thesis. Note the tentative register: quietly abolishes, suggests, is made to — rather than "this proves the speaker is sad".

Note too what it does not do. It does not say "the poet uses repetition". It shows the repetition and then says what it costs.

Example 3 — The same observation, badly handled

The poet uses repetition at the end of the poem, repeating "six teaspoons, the good scissors" from the first stanza. This shows that the speaker is still thinking about the objects. The poet also uses enjambment throughout, which makes the poem flow. There is imagery of a photograph, which shows that the list is important to the speaker.

Three failures, each common.

Feature-spotting. Three devices are named in four sentences and none is developed. Criterion B rewards depth, not coverage — one device analysed to its effect scores above three merely identified.

"This shows that" doing no work. "The speaker is still thinking about the objects" is a restatement of the repetition, not an interpretation of it.

"Which makes the poem flow." Enjambment does not make poems flow; it does specific things in specific places. If you cannot say what it does here, do not mention it.

Example 4 — Handling the title and the omission

The poem never states that anyone has died. The word "inventory" — a term from commerce and probate rather than from mourning — supplies the fact by implication, and the speaker's flat, procedural diction sustains the omission: things are "counted out", the house is "reduced to a list". The mother's single line of direct speech, "this is how it is done", is instruction rather than consolation, and the poem adopts its manner. What is withheld is therefore not information — any reader infers the death immediately — but feeling, and the poem's refusal to name grief is precisely how it conveys it. The final stanza's "although… although" registers the pressure of that refusal: the speaker argues with an objection nobody has made.

Silence is evidence. What a text declines to say is one of the richest sources of criterion A and B marks, and it is invisible to students hunting for devices. Ask of every text: what is conspicuously absent?

The last sentence does something worth copying — it reads a rhetorical tic (the doubled "although") as characterisation. Small formal details carrying large interpretive weight is what the top band looks like.

Educerie · original worked examples written against the published IB syllabus structure for Language A: Literature, amended guide, first assessment 2026. The poem "Inventory" is an original work written by Educerie for this material. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.