Texts and Human Experiences (prescribed text essay)

Paper 1 Section II is one extended response (an essay) worth 20 marks, on the prescribed text you studied for Texts and human experiences. The question is the same one English Advanced students answer, and it may include a stimulus, such as a quotation or a short unseen text, that you must use.

• The paper: 10 minutes reading time and 1 hour 30 minutes working time for 40 marks. Section II is half of Paper 1, so give it about 45 minutes.
• The question: usually one of three shapes: a "How does your prescribed text..." question, a statement followed by "To what extent does your prescribed text support this view?", or an "Evaluate" or "Explain" question.
• What is marked: how well you explain the way your text represents human experiences in answer to the question; how well you analyse techniques and use evidence; and how clearly you organise and express your ideas.

The prescribed texts (2027–2030)

The text list for this focus area is shared with English Advanced:

• Prose fiction: Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow; David Malouf, An Imaginary Life; Henry Lawson, Short Stories ("The Drover's Wife", "The Union Buries Its Dead", "Shooting the Moon", "Our Pipes", "The Loaded Dog").
• Poetry: Rosemary Dobson, Selected poems; Gwen Harwood, Selected Poems; Samuel Wagan Watson, Love Poems and Death Threats (seven set poems each).
• Drama, film or nonfiction: Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (nonfiction); Michael Gow, Away (drama); Rachel Perkins, One Night the Moon (film).

The Prescribed texts page for this course lists the set poems. Lawson's stories are out of copyright, so you can read them on this site. For the other texts, use your school's copy.

What the focus area asks

The syllabus asks how texts represent individual and collective human experiences, the emotions and qualities connected with them, and what they reveal about people. Your essay should show that you understand:

• the experiences your text represents (for example grief, isolation, belonging, love, memory, change, prejudice or endurance);
• how the text represents identity, acceptance and growth, and the tension between agency (making your own choices) and conformity (fitting in);
• the paradoxes in why people behave as they do, and how the text challenges the audience's assumptions;
• how the composer's choices of form and technique shape the audience's response.

Most marks come from the last point: every idea must be proved by analysing how the text creates it.

You cannot memorise a whole essay for an unknown question, but you can prepare all the parts.

Build an evidence bank

Choose three or four big ideas about human experience that your text explores. For each idea, collect four to six pieces of evidence:

1. a short quotation or, for film and drama, a precise moment (what we see and hear);
2. the technique;
3. one sentence on the effect: what it shows about the experience and how it affects the audience.

Keep quotations short. Five well-known words you can analyse are worth more than a full sentence you half-remember.

Know the whole text

Markers reward responses that move across the text: the opening, a turning point, the ending. Know how your text is structured and how the main characters, speakers or ideas change. For poetry, you must be ready to discuss at least two set poems in depth, so prepare four or five well.

Know the form

Each form has its own techniques, and you should use the right terms:

• Prose fiction: narrative voice, point of view, characterisation, setting, symbolism, structure, dialogue, imagery.
• Poetry: voice and persona, imagery, form (sonnet, free verse), stanza structure, enjambment, rhythm and rhyme, tone, shifts and endings.
• Drama: dialogue, stage directions, setting, symbolism, dramatic irony, structure (acts and scenes), the play-within-a-play.
• Film: camera shots and angles, framing, lighting, colour, sound and music, song lyrics, editing, mise-en-scène.
• Nonfiction: voice, anecdote, structure, reflection, the blend of personal and historical material.

Spend the first three minutes working out exactly what is being asked.

1. Circle the key words: the human experience named (for example "challenges", "contradictions", "grief"), and any other condition ("choices", "the ways people change").
2. Underline the command: "How does...", "To what extent...", "Evaluate...". "To what extent" means you must make a judgement and may agree, disagree or agree in part.
3. If there is a stimulus, decide how it connects to your text. You must refer to it, usually in your introduction and once more in the body.
4. Decide your answer in one sentence. This is your thesis.

A thesis that answers

A thesis is your answer to the question in one or two sentences. It should use the question's key words and say how the text does what it does.

Question (not one in our practice bank): "How does your prescribed text represent the ways people find meaning in ordinary moments?"

Weak: "Cold Enough for Snow is about ordinary moments."

Stronger: "In Cold Enough for Snow, Au suggests that meaning hides in the quietest parts of life — a meal, a walk in the rain, a painting — and uses restrained first-person narration and precise description to slow the reader down until those moments carry the weight of a whole relationship."

The stronger thesis names the experience, adds an insight about it, and points to the techniques that the essay will analyse.

A clear structure for 40–45 minutes:

1. Introduction (about 80–100 words): your thesis, the text and composer, and a brief outline of the two or three ideas you will develop.
2. Body paragraphs (two or three, about 200–250 words each): each one argues one idea.
3. Conclusion (about 50–80 words): return to the question's key words and restate your judgement, adding a final insight if you can.

Inside a body paragraph

• Topic sentence: a point that answers the question, not a fact about the plot.
• Evidence and analysis: three or four pieces of evidence, each with technique and effect. Move through the text (early, middle, late) where you can.
• Link: a final sentence that ties the paragraph back to the question.

This example is on a question not in our practice bank: "How does your prescribed text represent the way communities treat those on the edge of them?" It uses Lawson's "The Union Buries Its Dead".

Topic sentence: In "The Union Buries Its Dead", Lawson shows that a bush community can perform respect for a stranger while feeling almost nothing, exposing the gap between ritual and real care.

Analysis: The drowned young labourer was "almost a stranger in town", and the narrator admits flatly that "We were all strangers to the corpse." The funeral happens only because Union papers were found in his swag, so belonging is defined by a membership card rather than by being known. Lawson's laconic, ironic narrator undercuts the ceremony at every step: the procession is just "fourteen souls following the broken shell of a soul", and most mourners are too drunk to follow the hearse. Near the end the narrator refuses the conventions of the sentimental bush funeral story — "I have left out the wattle—because it wasn't there" — and the final admission that "we have already forgotten the name" denies the reader any comforting resolution.

Link: Through irony, understatement and a self-aware narrator, Lawson suggests that belonging on the edge of a community can be fragile, and invites readers to question romantic images of bush mateship.

Notice the pattern: point, then evidence with a named technique and its effect, then a link to the question.

When the question includes a stimulus (a quotation, an image or a short unseen text):

• refer to it in your introduction and connect it to your thesis;
• use one of its key words or images again in one body paragraph and in your conclusion;
• keep most of your analysis on your prescribed text. The stimulus is a lens, not the subject.

If you run short of time, finish your current paragraph and write a two-sentence conclusion. An essay with a conclusion reads as complete.

• Retelling the plot: narrating what happens instead of arguing how it is represented. A useful test: does each sentence say how or why?
• A prepared essay that ignores the question: markers can tell when a response has been memorised. Re-word your topic sentences in the question's own terms.
• Technique lists: naming three techniques in a sentence without explaining any of them.
• Only one poem or story: for poetry and Lawson, the response must discuss at least two set poems or stories in depth.
• Ignoring "to what extent": a statement question needs a judgement. You can agree with qualifications ("largely, but...").
• Using the wrong form's terms: talking about "the reader" and "chapters" for a film, or "camera" for a poem.

• Learn the composer's full name and the correct spelling of key character names and poem titles.
• Use the present tense when discussing what a text does: "Malouf presents", "the film shows".
• Embed short quotations in your sentences rather than writing them on their own.
• Write about the audience: "invites us to", "positions the audience to", "evokes empathy for".
• Name the human experience and its qualities explicitly (resilience, guilt, hope, prejudice), since these are the focus area's language.
• Practise full essays in 40–45 minutes at least three or four times before the exam, using different question types.

• Texts and human experiences (unseen texts): the same close analysis skills, practised on short texts. Many students find that unseen practice improves their essay paragraphs.
• Close study of literature: both focus areas ask for a sustained argument about one prescribed text, so essay structures transfer directly.
• The craft of writing: studying how your prescribed text creates effects gives you techniques to use in your own writing.