How to Analyse Quotes for PEAD (INESA)

A step-by-step guide to analysing quotes for the Analysis part of your PEAD paragraphs.

What is this Guide for?

This guide is to help people who find analysing quotations difficult when answering exam questions. When you are writing essay or exam paragraphs in English literature or English language at GCSE or A-Level, it’s highly recommended you use the PEAD method to organise your argument. PEAD stands for Point, Evidence Analysis Development, and using this structure makes it much more likely that you will talk about all the things you need to for those high-level scores.

Note: Other teachers and organisations use different acronyms to describe PEAD, you might see PEAL, PEA, PEEL, or something similar. They all mean the same thing.

To begin using this guide you need to have already chosen good quotes.

Our Example: Remains by Simon Armitage

To give examples of what I am talking about I will be using an extract from the Simon Armitage poem “Remains. The BBC have a helpful AQA revision guide with a full reading if you want to see more of the poem.

What are the Main Steps? (INESA)

I’ve broken analysing quotes into 5 different steps with the acronym INESA:

  • Identify Important Words and Phrases

  • Name And Explain

  • Explore the Connotations

  • Summarise Your Combined Connotations

  • Affect on the Reader/Audience

You can find out more about each part of INESA in the detailed steps below.

Step 1: Identify Important Words and Phrases

Step one is all about looking for the most important words and phrases in your quote(s). At this point we aren’t writing anything, just looking for what to analyse in step 3 and separating them for later. Highlighting or underlining might help!

There are a few different ways of thinking about this step to help you:

What is Fact and What is Opinion?

There will always be things in sentences that are simple facts like the time of day, a person’s name, or where they are going, but there are also a lot of opportunities to find opinions as well. Let’s look at some examples:

  • Nouns - There is a big difference between a house, a home, a shack, and a cottage, but they all describe a place someone could live in.

  • Adjectives and Adverbs - I can describe a house as small, tiny, cramped, cute, or boutique, and they all mean that this house is little. The opinion comes from the difference between a ‘cramped’ house and a ‘boutique’ house, for example. Cramped sounds very unpleasant and like we need more space, but boutique implies the house has exactly what it needs but is small.

Literary Devices

Are there any literary devices in your quote? We know that identifying and explaining how devices work is something we need to do for GCSE and A-Level, so having a device in your quote that is relevant to the question or topic is a big bonus.

Altering the Meaning

Anything in your quote that changes the overall meaning is important to think about. If we take the example of a sign on a door that reads “Closed on Sundays”, we could reasonably think that it’s quite normal for places to be closed on a Sunday. It that sign is on a church door though, that changes the meaning a lot, and we should definitely talk about it!

Step 2: Name And Explain

Ok, so it might seem like a really obvious step, but naming what you are looking at is a part of getting those higher grades. Sometimes it’s nice and easy like the “author uses simile to…”, but other times it’s not so clear. Let’s look at some examples:

Literary Devices

  • Metaphor, personification.

  • Simile.

  • Juxtaposition, oxymoron, antithesis.

  • Alliteration, sibilance, plosive sounds.

Structure

  • Cyclical, cliffhanger, starting at the end.

  • Interesting punctuation: (,) pauses, (.) long pauses, (;) medium pauses, (-) interruption, (?!) interrobang, (“) dialog.

  • Shifting focus between different topics, what order they are presented in.

  • Repetition, anaphora, epistrophe.

Other Interesting Details

This is your opportunity to point out anything that sticks out to you that doesn’t fit neatly into language or structure. I’ve seen authors use punctuation deliberately incorrectly, make their characters speak then contradict themselves, and even write a sentence with a full stop (.) after each word.

What if I Don’t Know the Name?

Describe it! A simile is a device that compares two things and says they are similar, sharing the attributes of one with the other. Juxtaposition is placing two very different concepts close together so that they can be directly compared, highlighting and exaggerating their differences. It’s longer, but it’s a kind of naming!

Step 3: Explore the Connotations

This is the most important part of analysis, and the bit most people skip over… which makes me cry. Go through the important parts you identified in step 1 and look at the connotations of each element you have found. Write these down and explore their various meanings.

Choose a Main Observation

Focus on one element for each PEAD paragraph, you don’t have time for more than that and it gets too complicated. For our example, we’ll focus on the semantic field of rest and use the violent verbs as supportive evidence.

Connotations - What is Associated?

Write out the connotations of (words and ideas associated with) each element individually to make sure you look in enough detail. An element should be small like a word or a few words like in our example.

Step 4: Summarise Your Combined Connotations

You’ve done the difficult part, now you get to sound smart by summarizing your connotations and putting them back into their original context.

In our example, we can summarise the connotations of the semantic field of rest with the violent verbs to reach a logical conclusion: the soldier is experiencing repeated visions of the man he shot at the bank coming back every time he closes his eyes.

Summarise: Don’t Repeat

To summarise well you want to give a small amount of information that relates to most of the important ideas you explored. Repeating all the things you have already explored in connotations is a waste of time - they just read that!

Back to Context

What do these connotations mean when you put it back into its original context? In our example, the speaker is a soldier, and the rest he is talking about is the time he is not actively fighting. The violent verbs relate to the man he shot who was entering the bank. If every time he talks about any form of rest he sees the man from the bank, it seems he is experiencing PTSD flashbacks.

Step 5: Affect on the Reader/Audience

All that’s left to do is answer what the author is trying to make you think or feel, and why they would want to do that. Technically this is part of the D (development) in PEAD, but your ideas about what and why come from your analysis so it makes sense to explore these ideas in this guide.

What’s the Most Likely Reader Reaction?

  • Suffering? → sympathy/empathy.

  • Happiness? → joy (or horror if the character is happy about something terrible).

  • Danger? → anxiety, fear, racing heart.

Why the Author Might Want You to Feel That Way

  • The author cares about this topic and wants you to care/understand it too.

  • It’s important for what comes later that you feel this now (if the author wants you anxious now, it might be to make you feel relief later).

  • Having you experience similar emotions to the characters, to empathise with them and their choices.

  • To immerse you in the story as if you are there.

  • They are pressured by authority to send a certain message (some countries are scary).

Our Final Analysis Section

Here is our complete example analysis section, but remember that before this there would be a point and evidence section:

“… Armitage creates a semantic field of rest with the words, “blink”, “sleep”, and “dream”, and each time any form of rest is mentioned for the soldier, it is paired with violent verbs such as “burst”, and “torn”. The combination gives the reader the impression that whenever the soldier attempts to rest, he feels attacked by his memory of the man he shot at the bank. The inescapability this demonstrates is a horrifying look at what PTSD feels like for the soldier Armitage interviewed for “Remains”.

We would then continue from here to talk about the developments, which would include author intention, the affect on the audience, and historical context.

Need More Help with PEAD?

If you need any support for your Point, Evidence, Analysis, Development paragraphs that you can’t find here, there are other resources here that might help you: