Literature Homework Help

About Literature

Literature asks what a text does and how it does it. The questions students bring here are mostly about set poems, novels and plays: the theme of a poem, why a character acts as they do, what a figure of speech achieves, the difference between the poet and the speaker. The answers that score are the ones that quote, then explain the effect.

Popular Topics in Literature

How ScanSolve Helps with Literature

Photograph the poem, extract or question and ScanSolve answers from the text in front of it: the point, the quotation that supports it, then the effect. Where a question names a device, the answer says what the device achieves in that line rather than defining it in the abstract — which is the difference between a definition mark and an analysis mark.

If a question refers to a set text the image does not include, the answer says so and asks for the passage instead of inventing a plot. Where two poems or texts are compared, the response is organised by point of comparison rather than one text after the other, which is how comparison marks are awarded.

Study Tips for Literature

• Quote short and explain long. A six-word quotation with three sentences of analysis scores better than a sentence quoted and left to speak for itself.

• Separate the speaker from the poet. "The speaker feels abandoned" is a literary claim; "the poet was abandoned" is a biographical guess.

• Name the effect, not just the device. "A simile" earns little; "the simile makes his grief sound ordinary and domestic" earns the mark.

• Reread the question after your first paragraph. Literature answers drift into retelling the story faster than any other subject.