From the printed extract to a finished argument

You have the extract, the question and the clock. The most useful minutes of the answer come before you write a single sentence. This video spends those minutes in full on one question, builds the plan, and then writes the opening paragraph.

This is the video where we write one; the play itself is taught in the others, beginning with the Overview.

One shape only here: an extract to start from, then the play as a whole, in one answer. The video about your own exam paper covers the other shapes. The question: starting with this moment, how does Shakespeare show the bond between Capulet and Juliet breaking, and what does the play as a whole say about parents and children? The printed extract is from Act 3 Scene 5, and it opens on Capulet himself. God's bread, it makes me mad! Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, Alone, in company, still my care hath been To have her matched. It runs through his insults and his threat, and it ends as he storms out, with Juliet turning to her mother: O sweet my mother, cast me not away!

Step one is placing it, in one sentence that says where this moment sits and what changed just before it. Three possible openings. First: In Shakespeare's didactic play Romeo and Juliet, the theme of family is explored. Didactic means designed to teach a lesson. Second: Capulet shouts a lot of insults at Juliet in this extract. Third: The morning after Tybalt's death, Capulet turns the care he once showed Juliet into a threat. Which of those three openings places the extract? The last one. It names when this is happening and what has just changed, so a reader knows why the father has turned. The first is a label that could open any essay, and didactic does no work here. One examiner's report warns against openings that seem pre-prepared, with set phrases or vocabulary. The second retells instead of placing. The fix is to place the moment first: Tuesday morning, Romeo gone at dawn, Tybalt dead the day before, and the wedding fixed for Thursday.

Step two is one question asked of the extract: what does this moment let me say about the play as a whole? To answer it, pick three areas spread across the extract, each with a word worth analysing, rather than crawling through it line by line. Which three areas would you pick? Pause and work it out. Three that work. His care as a list of labour, Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play. His daughter as a puppet, A whining mammet. And Juliet's turn to her mother, cast me not away. A mammet is a puppet, and labour is hard work done for someone. Together the three give a line of argument: in this family, Capulet's care and his control have become the same thing. One examiner's report, on the answers that did well, says they often covered three or more areas from across the whole of their chosen extract. That spread is the habit to copy, and it leaves you time for the rest of the play.

Step three carries the argument out of the extract, to three moments that answer the same question in different ways. For the father before the change, three candidates: the Prince's warning after the street fight, Capulet asking Paris to win her heart, or Capulet stopping Tybalt at the feast. Which of those three gives the sharpest contrast with the extract? The middle one. My will to her consent is but a part: in Act 1 her yes counted, and by Tuesday it counts for nothing. The second moment comes from the other adults who raised and advised her, the Nurse and Friar Lawrence. Why do the Nurse and the Friar belong in a paragraph about parents? They act as her substitute parents, and they fail her the same way, deciding what is best for her. The Nurse tells her to marry Paris, and the Friar's plan decides everything. The third moment is the ending. The Prologue warns that only the children's deaths can end the parents' rage, and the play ends with two fathers making peace over two bodies. That is the plan: place the extract, ask what it says about the play, then bring in three moments that answer differently.

Now the plan becomes an opening paragraph, written the way you would write it in the exam. At this moment, the morning after Tybalt's death, Capulet turns the care he once showed Juliet into a threat. In Act 1 he told Paris, My will to her consent is but a part. Yet here his list, Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, makes his love sound like labour she owes him for. Shakespeare shows that in this family, protecting a daughter and controlling her have become the same act. Across the play, every parent, real and substitute, is tested against that idea, until only their children's deaths can end the feud.

That paragraph came quickly because the plan came first. The extract works as a doorway into the play: ask it one question, what this moment lets you say about the play as a whole, and the paragraphs follow in order.

Three steps, so three questions, and then one more on a different extract. What goes in the very first sentence? The placing: where this moment sits, and what changed just before it. Next: what is the one question you ask of the extract? This one: what this moment lets me say about the play as a whole. Now: how many areas of the extract, and from where? Three or more, spread from its opening to its last line, never line by line. Here's a different extract: Capulet on Sunday, telling Paris to wait. Where does your placing sentence start? Before any of it: Sunday, before the feast, before Juliet has met Romeo, while her father still asks for her consent.

Building a three-point plan from a printed extract in five minutes means this one has stuck, and the thumbs up is how you file it away. If it hasn't yet, put it on your watch-later list and run the three steps on a different extract, since each new extract you plan takes less time than the one before.

That is the last of the Romeo and Juliet videos in this collection, and the story is always waiting in the Overview.

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