How to examine a text
NESA defines it as: “Inquire into.”
Examine means to inquire into: to look closely and in detail. It is an invitation to go beneath the surface rather than skate across it, so an examine question rewards depth over coverage.
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Depth over breadth
Examining means staying with a moment long enough to see everything in it.
- 1
Choose fewer moments
Pick evidence rich enough to turn over, rather than rushing through many quotes.
- 2
Look from more than one angle
Examine the same moment for technique, tone, irony, and its position in the play.
- 3
Stay with it
Resist moving to the next quote too soon. The marks are in mining the one you have.
The shape of the paragraph
The paragraph takes one rich piece of evidence and examines it from several angles before drawing its significance.
Topic sentence (the claim)
Open with a conceptual claim that answers the question and pushes your thesis forward, in the question's own words. It should be an idea about the text, not a fact about the plot.
Watch out:If your opening could be followed by 'and then...', it is a recount. Start with an idea, rather than an event.
A single rich piece of evidence
Introduce one quote worth dwelling on, and resist the urge to stack others beside it.
Watch out:Choose evidence with layers. A thin quote cannot reward close inquiry.
Sustained analysis (several angles)
Examine the moment across two or three angles: what the technique does, the irony of who says it, where it sits in the play.
Watch out:Keep the angles distinct, so each sentence adds a new facet rather than restating the last.
Return line
Draw the close inquiry back to the larger idea, showing what this one moment reveals about the whole.
Watch out:Make the payoff proportional to the depth. Close reading should end somewhere that matters.
A model paragraph, labelled sentence by sentence
Here is the structure at work. Read the paragraph straight through first: it should sound like one continuous argument, not a checklist. Then read the label beside each sentence to see the job it is doing. It is written to support this thesis:
The thesis
In The Crucible, Miller represents hysteria not as loud chaos but as the moment reason surrenders its own authority, dramatised most fully when Proctor, the play's voice of sense, breaks down entirely.
The paragraph, read straight through
Miller examines the collapse of reason most searchingly through Proctor, the one character who has spoken sense, at the instant he loses his grip on it. As the court turns on him, Proctor cries “God is dead!”, and the outburst repays close attention. As hyperbole it is literally false, yet its very extremity measures how far Salem has fallen, and coming from the play's most rational man, the blasphemy marks the point where reason itself gives up, ceding the stage to the hysteria it can no longer answer. Miller lets the line land without comment, so that the audience feels the vertigo of a world where the sane are condemned and the court has usurped the place of God. Examined closely, this single cry holds the whole tragedy: the moment collective madness becomes the only authority left standing.
Miller examines the collapse of reason most searchingly through Proctor, the one character who has spoken sense, at the instant he loses his grip on it.
As the court turns on him, Proctor cries “God is dead!”, and the outburst repays close attention.
As hyperbole it is literally false, yet its very extremity measures how far Salem has fallen,
and coming from the play's most rational man, the blasphemy marks the point where reason itself gives up, ceding the stage to the hysteria it can no longer answer.
Miller lets the line land without comment, so that the audience feels the vertigo of a world where the sane are condemned and the court has usurped the place of God.
Examined closely, this single cry holds the whole tragedy: the moment collective madness becomes the only authority left standing.
Every quotation above is verbatim from The Crucible (Arthur Miller) and verified against the source text.
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The definition is quoted from NESA's Glossary of Key Words. The structure, teaching and model paragraph are our own, aligned to the 2017 English Advanced syllabus (2019–2026 prescriptions).