How to Choose Quotes for PEAD (UHESC)

A step-by-step guide to choosing good quotes for the Evidence part of your PEAD paragraphs.

What is this Guide for?

This guide is to help people who find choosing good 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.

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 audio reading if you want to see more of the poem.

What are the Main Steps? (UHESC)

I’ve broken choosing good quotes down into 5 different steps with the acronym UHESC:

  • Understand what you need evidence for.

  • Highlight evidence in the text.

  • Evaluate the best quotes.

  • Select what you need.

  • Give Context.

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

Step 1: Understand What You Are Looking For

Look at your question and make sure you understand exactly what you are looking for. Here are some things to think about:

What?

If you are answering a question about how a specific character is described, make sure you only highlight descriptions of the correct character. Descriptions of other characters, what the characters say, settings, buildings, and other things are not important.

Break down your question to make sure you understand what exactly you need evidence of:

Example Question: How does Simon Armitage portray PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in “Remains”?

What are we looking for?: Descriptions of PTSD and how it affects people.

Where?

Exam questions often focus on one part of a text, so make sure you know where to look. Our poetry example is easy because we can use anything in the poem, but many exam questions will give you extracts or specific line numbers to look for your evidence.

When?

You can be asked to describe characters or events at certain times in a story. In “A Christmas Carol”, by Charles Dickens, you might be asked to contrast Ebenezer Scrooge’s character in Stave 1 with his character in Stave 5 after he has undergone a lot of personal changes. Don’t write about all the other sections of the book; focus on exactly what you are asked for.

Step 2: Highlight Evidence in the Text

It’s a simple step but an important one; go through the text and highlight all the parts relevant to what you are looking for. This gives you an easy visual of what to evaluate next. This way you can pick what you are going to quote from the highlighted sections and ignore the rest.

Can’t Highlight or Don’t Like Highlights?

There are other visual options if highlighters don’t work for you:

  • Large brackets in the margins to show where a section starts and ends [ ].

  • Underline.

  • Draw a line across the page above and below the relevant sections.

Can’t Draw or Write on the Text?

You might have to get a little creative and use the edges of whatever you have on the desk to show where sections begin and end. You could line up an eraser at the beginning and a pen at the end, for example.

Step 3: Evaluate the Best Quotes

There’s no time to go crazy in depth here, analysis comes later. Just look at what you have highlighted and evaluate the best ones to use in your paragraph.

What To Look For When Choosing a Good Quote:

  • Sections with the most interesting, or strongest, meaning you can explore later in the analysis.

  • Literary devices are useful because you are graded on identifying, analysing, and explaining them.

  • Interesting structural devices (but not for a question about language!).

  • Multiple things you can explore and explain in the same quote.

What If I Can’t Find a Literary Device?

No problem! Word choice is always a great way to analyse text. Look for interesting meanings and analyse the choice of adjectives, nouns, adverbs, etc., in the next section.

What if There Isn’t a Good Quote?

In exams, you just have to do the best you can and work with what you’ve got. Find the best you have available and use that. You can talk about what things “could” mean, and more than one interpretation to show you can consider alternatives and evaluate them.

Step 4: Select What You Need

For this extract, I’m choosing to quote the violent verbs and the semantic field of rest because it contains interesting devices and, most importantly, it holds a lot of meaning about the nature of PTSD and its effects on people. By using these two ideas together, I can show how every time the soldier tries to rest, there is a confronting, violent or troubling reaction in his mind.

What Do You Have Time to Analyse?

For our example, I will quote the violent verbs without their context, even though it is extremely interesting, because we don’t have time to analyse all of the other elements in the more extended violent verb quotes. So, to keep things focused, I will only select the violent verbs themselves and the words in the semantic field of rest.

Cut Out What You Don’t Need

For the semantic field of rest, all I really need are the words “blink”, “sleep”, and “dream”. I don’t need to quote the entire section they are in because they are clear enough without the surrounding context. For the violent verbs, I can use them on their own like the semantic field, or quote them with their context, because it helps to explain what the soldier is remembering:

“he bursts again through the doors of the bank”, and “he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds.”

As stated above though, I’m going to be analysing too much if I take the context too, so I will only quote the verbs without the surrounding sentence.

Include What You Do Need

Your quote needs to make sense without too much contextual explanation. If your quote doesn’t make any sense, you have probably cut out too much. Don’t cut out important words in your sentence that are the key to understanding the meaning.

Step 5: Give Context

We have to write as if the person marking our exam papers has not read the book or text to show we can explain our ideas to anyone, not just an English expert. Part of doing that properly is being very clear about the context of the quote.

Quote Context to Include:

  • Who is speaking, and who to? If you are quoting speech, it’s very important to include information about who you are quoting and in what situation.

  • Where is this in the text?

  • When does this happen? Is it important that this happens before or after another event?

In Our Example

The entire Simon Armitage Poem “Remains” is from the point of view of one soldier being interviewed, so it is not important to refer to who the speaker is in every quote, and there are no important events in the poem that come before or after these quotes that change the meaning. It only makes sense in our example to point to where the quotes are in the text, so that is the only context we are including in our evidence section.

Our Final Evidence Section

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

“At the end of stanza five, and throughout the sixth stanza, Armitage combines a semantic field of rest comprised of the words, “blink”, “sleep”, and “dream”, with the violent verbs, “burst” and “torn apart”.”

After this, you would move on to analysing your evidence in the next section!

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: