SQA Higher English

Higher English reading uses non-fiction of the kind found in newspapers and magazines: opinion columns, personal reflections, reports with a point of view, humorous pieces and arguments about an issue. The skill is close reading, which means paying attention to what the writer says and to how the language says it. Two questions sit behind everything: what are the writer's main ideas or views, and which techniques put those ideas across?

What to establish before answering anything

A first read should leave you able to say, in a sentence or two, what the passage is about and what the writer thinks about it. After that, three further questions are worth asking.

1. What is the writer trying to do? The aim might be to persuade, to inform, to provoke a reaction, to reflect on a personal experience or to entertain, and some pieces combine several.
2. Who is the writer talking to, and what do they assume the reader already knows or believes? A columnist who writes "we all remember" is building a shared position with the audience.
3. How does the passage develop? Many writers open with an anecdote or a striking image, move to the general issue, qualify their view and close by returning to the opening or by looking ahead.

Making a margin note on each paragraph that says what the paragraph is for, in four or five words, is the quickest way to see the line of argument. A paragraph might be introducing a claim, giving an example, conceding a counter-argument or drawing a conclusion.

Ideas and examples are different things

Writers support an idea with illustration: an anecdote, a statistic, a quotation from an expert, a comparison, a list of cases. The illustration is not the idea. If a writer says that city life erodes neighbourliness, and then describes living for ten years beside a family whose name they never learned, the idea is the erosion of neighbourliness and the family is the example.

Separating the two matters for every kind of question. A question about the writer's views wants the idea, in your own words. A question about the writer's techniques may want you to comment on how an example works. A summary wants ideas only. Training yourself to underline the main idea in a paragraph, and to bracket the example, makes all of these easier.

A useful test is to ask whether a sentence would still matter if the example were swapped for a different one. If it would, the sentence carries an idea. If it would not, it is the example.

Stance, purpose and impact

The writer's stance is their position on the subject: supportive, critical, doubtful, nostalgic, amused, angry. It is usually visible in the writer's choice of words, in what they emphasise and in what they pass over quickly. Purpose is what the piece is meant to do to the reader. Impact is what it actually does to you, and an evaluative response is entitled to say whether it worked.

Each of the later skills (word choice, imagery, sentence structure, punctuation, tone and structure) serves stance and purpose. A comment on a technique is only worth making when it says how the technique helps the writer's aim. Consider a writer who describes a seaside town's decline: the shuttered amusements, the gulls over an empty promenade. Naming the technique is a start, and the useful part is the next step, which is that the images of emptiness make the town's loss feel like a bereavement, and so push the reader towards the writer's regret.

Working with an unseen passage

A few habits help with unfamiliar writing.

• Read the headline, the standfirst and any source line first; they often state the topic and the writer's slant.
• Read the passage once for sense without stopping on hard words. Return to unfamiliar vocabulary afterwards and work out the meaning from the sentence around it.
• Note the places where the writer changes direction. Words such as "however", "yet", "of course" and "admittedly" often introduce a concession or a turn in the argument, which is usually worth commenting on.
• Distinguish clearly between what the writer says and what you infer. An inference is a conclusion that the text supports but does not state outright, and it needs a stated basis.
• When a question refers to a line or a paragraph, reread that part in the context of the whole passage rather than answering from memory.

Common types of non-fiction writing

Different kinds of writing lean on different techniques, and recognising the kind helps you predict what to look for.

The categories overlap, and a single article can begin as a personal reflection and finish as an argument.

From reading to a written answer

An answer in this course has two parts that must both be present: a reference to the passage and a comment on it. Quoting a phrase without explaining what it does shows only that you can find a phrase. The comment is where the understanding is shown. A reference can be a direct quotation, kept short, or a close paraphrase of a particular detail, as long as it is clear exactly which part of the passage you mean.

A basic comment says what the technique or word suggests. A fuller comment explains how it creates that suggestion and connects it to the writer's purpose or to the effect on the reader. In practice that means moving from "this shows the town is empty" to "the word the writer picks carries an association of death, so the decline reads as a loss to be mourned and not just an economic change".