SPEAKER 1:You can find ideas anywhere. I mean I never would've thought we would have written a song about Magwitch from 'Great Expectations.'
"Abel. When you grabbed his hand you scared him half to death. Abel. He couldn't know, you would never let go. Abel…"
SPEAKER 2:At school we learned this thing to help analyse a book if you're writing an essay and this system is called 'point, evidence, analysis.'This system also works really well for writing a song.
Take a point you want to make: Magwitch doesn't have the advantages Compeyson does but really you want to say he's more of a gentleman than Compeyson despite this. Then you find the evidence.
"He was set up for a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he'd been to boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talkand was a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too."
BOTH SINGING:"Back when status dictated you can't or you can there was no key to the world for this man. Not like old school tie Compeyson.For the sake of love Magwitch was a villain."
SPEAKER 2:That verse, that's the analysis isn't it? You're talking about the time we were even more obsessed by class then we are now.
SPEAKER 1:Whenever we're writing, and especially when we're using something like Dickens as inspiration we organise our thoughts before we write, and summarise what we want to say. You use the book, find something that strikes a chord, and go from there.
BOTH SINGING:"Gentle pressure on Pip's hand. Estella lives in this fine land. A wretched life, but at last a winner. O' Lord, be merciful to hima sinner."
This short film for KS3 English students demonstrates how to creatively analyse a Charles Dickens text.
Band Pickering White demonstrate how to use point, evidence and analysis to make supported comments about literary texts.
With the support of onscreen captions highlighting key words, they use their song lyrics about the character Magwitch from Great Expectations to provide examples of the analytical method.
Teacher Notes
You could ask students to think about a character from a text that they are studying and ask them to bullet-point three or more comments they would make about that character’s personality.
Model an example for the class then ask them to write their three bullet points out using the same structure.
Curriculum Notes
This clip is relevant for teaching English Language at KS3 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and third and fourth level in Scotland.
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