CONTEXT AND IDEAS
How to write about big ideas in literary texts
Writing about big ideas is one of the most important things you need to do to access the higher grades at GCSE (7-9). You have to write not just about what happens in the texts you study but about what those texts tell us about the human condition. This guide will explain what this means and how to do it.
Why big ideas are what stories are really about
If somebody asks you what a story is about, there are two different ways you can answer the question:
You can say what happens in the story - it is about an orphan boy who attends a boarding school for witches and wizards and who overcomes an evil wizard.
You can say what big ideas the story explores - it is about growing up; it is about the importance of family; it is about friendship, loyalty and how it feels to find somewhere that you belong.
The first answer shows that you’ve understood the basic story; the second answer shows that you’ve understood what the story is really about, the deeper meaning of the story. You need to be able to show this second kind of understanding in your essays to get to the highest marks. This guide will take you through how to do that.
What actually are big ideas?
Writing about big ideas means writing about what the text is telling us about the real world. It means going beyond the narrative and into its wider meaning, into what it tells us about abstract ideas that exist in the real world and effect real people’s lives. In other words, you need to be able to write about what the text tells us about the human condition.
What are people like? How do societies work? What problems do people face growing up? Why are some people unkind? What makes someone a good friend? What does it feel like to fall in love? What does it mean to be a man? What is justice? What does it mean to live a good life? How should society’s go about supporting the poor without discouraging individual endeavour? How does anyone deal with the death of a loved one? What are any of us even here for?
Stories provide answers to questions like these, and to many, many more questions too. They’re not necessarily the right answers, and they’re certainly not the only answers, but they are answers. Writing about big ideas means showing that you understand the questions that each text asks, and the answers that it provides.
Let’s look at some examples to make this a bit more clear and concrete.
What happens in the text
A young couple fall in love and decide to pursue their relationship despite the objections of their friends and family.
Big ideas the text might explore
What it feels like to fall in love; what romantic relationships are like in the early days; the importance of family; the difficulties of growing up and moving on from parents and school friends.
What happens in the text
A group of old friends in their 30s spend an evening together on the night before one of them moves to another country.
Big ideas the text might explore
What it feels like to grow older; how friendships change over time; the importance of childhood and memory; how social groups function, including co-operation and power hierarchies; different ways that women and men interact.
Another way to think about big ideas: imagining an alien reader
Another way to think about how to write a good ideas-based essay is to ask yourself the following question: if an alien who knew nothing about human life were to read your essay, what would it learn about what it means to be human?
So, if your essay is about about how a text presents romantic relationships, for example, what would an alien learn from reading your essay about how romantic relationships work? Would the alien learn something about romantic relationships in general, or would it just learn something about what happens in the poems or the novel or the play that you’re analysing? This is an important question, especially for GCSE essays.
If the alien wouldn’t learn anything much about romantic relationships - if it would have to figure it out for itself, essentially - then your essay is likely to be in the Grade 4-5 bracket. If the alien would get a clear sense of what romantic relationships are like, then your essay would be at the top of Grade 6. However, if the alien would learn something thoughtful or, better yet, something insightful or perceptive about how human romantic relationships work, then your essay is going to be into the top grades (7-9). This is another way to think about writing about big ideas: what would your essay teach an alien about the human condition?
Big ideas vs. themes
At this point you might be wondering if big ideas are the same as themes. Well, they almost are. Themes are big ideas that recur in a text. To become a theme, a big idea needs to feature at several different points in the text. It needs to be one of the main ideas in the text.
However, texts can explore big ideas without them being themes. They can be important in one section of the text but never explored again. In which case, you can write about those big ideas without writing about a theme.
What big ideas you need to write about for any given question
When you get an essay question, you need to figure out what big ideas you need to write about. Sometimes this will be clearly sign-posted in the question, either using the phrase “ideas about” or just by stating an idea explicitly in the question. Here are two examples of explicitly ideas-based questions – it’s easy to see what the big ideas are here:
1. How does Charlotte Perkins Gilman present ideas about self-expression in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’?
2. How does William Golding present leadership in ‘Lord of the Flies’?
Here you would need to write about self-expression and leadership respectively. These are the two big ideas that are stated in these two questions. They’re big ideas because they’re abstract things that exist in the world and because the questions don’t mention any characters or bits of plot or anything else - they just mention these big ideas.
Other times, the big ideas you need to write about won’t be so obvious, but you should be able to figure them out based on the question. Here are two non-ideas-based questions, which still have big ideas at their heart:
3. How far does Shakespeare present Macbeth as a violent man?
4. How does Priestley present Sheila as a character who learns important lessons about herself and society?
These are character-based questions, but there are still big ideas alluded to here.
If you know anything about Macbeth, you will know that Question 3 is, above all, a question about masculinity, especially the role that violence plays in it; it’s also a question about what else it means to be a man.
Question 4 is a question about how much people change, or don’t change, based on their experiences; it’s also a question about how society works, especially for women.
Your study of the texts in class will help you to understand how the questions link to the big ideas contained in those texts, especially when those big ideas are major themes, like masculinity in Macbeth.
Above all, though, you need to write about the big ideas that are either clearly stated in the question or those that are implied by the question. This is what your teacher (at KS3) or the exam board (at GCSE and A Level) will be looking for in your essay. You can write about other big ideas too, depending on the argument you want to make, but you must write about the big ideas in the question.
How to make ideas-based points
Big ideas should drive your answer to any essay question. You will, of course, need to write about the things that happen in the text (the characters and the plot), as well as the methods that the writer uses and the context of the text. However, big ideas need to have a central place in your argument. With this in mind:
All analysis should involve some discussion of big ideas (see the next section of this guide for more detail on this).
Ideas-based questions will need ideas-based points, and you can make ideas-based points in character questions too (see example 3 below).
Below are two examples of ideas-based points: notice how neither of them mentions the plot or the characters of the texts – they each just discuss the big ideas stated in the questions (self-expression and leadership):
1. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggests that self-expression is an essential part of any person’s life and that, without it, people will not live authentic lives.
2. In ‘Lord of the Flies’ William Golding suggests that, even when a more appealing leader is evident to others, some people will still side with the person who already has power over them.
For a character-based question, like the one above about Sheila being a character who changes, you can also make points which bring in big ideas. Here’s an example:
3. Sheila is initially presented as a self-centred and rather frivolous person who Priestley uses to represent the kind of spoiled upper-class young women who he believed were common in Edwardian Britain because of the individualist mindset that people held.
How to write about big ideas in your analysis
The discussion of big ideas can go anywhere in the analysis part of a PEA paragraph. It might go before the discussion of methods, or it might go at the end of your analysis of a piece of evidence, or might might be peppered throughout the analysis in small chunks – whatever feels most natural to you when you’re writing the paragraph.
The important thing is that, at some point, you go from explaining what happens in the text to explaining what the text tells us about big ideas (e.g. about how the real world works and how people in general act, think and feel, including discussion of abstract concepts).
In other words you have to go from the specific (the text) to the general (big ideas).
Let’s look at two worked examples.
Worked example 1 - an ideas-based question
First, we’ll look at an example using an ideas-based point (plus evidence), which addresses an ideas-based question (Q2 above about leadership):
In ‘Lord of the Flies’ Golding suggests that, even when a more appealing leader is evident to others, some people will still side with the person who already has power over them. During the election, even after most of the other boys have voted for Ralph for chief, when it comes to a vote for Jack, the choir raise their hands “with dreary obedience.”
After this you would explain your reasoning, and you could analyse some methods (e.g. the adverb ‘dreary’). Then you could discuss the big ideas: what does this episode reveal about people in general when it comes to leadership? And this discussion of ideas might look something like this:
Through this episode, Golding suggests that, even when a consensus exists for a leader, there will always be other people reluctantly supporting someone else because that person has power over them – economic power, social power, whatever – and that only a democratic system that gives voice to sufficient people will elect the right kind of leaders, or at least not elect the worst kind of leaders, as Jack would have been had the choir succeeded here.
Worked example 2 - a character-based question
Here’s another example, using a non-ideas-based question (Q3 above about Macbeth being a violent man), with a non-ideas-based point (plus evidence):
In Act 1 Scene 2, Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a valiant and much-loved soldier who is, nevertheless, brutally violent on the battlefield. At the climax of the first part of the battle, Macbeth “unseams [Macdonald] from the nave to the chaps” and places his decapitated head on a Scottish castle’s battlements.
So far, both the point and evidence are very much character-based. They refer to what Macbeth does (chopping a man in half and cutting his head off) and how other people feel about him (they love him). First, this would all need to be explained and analysed, using reasoning (e.g. around his role in quelling the rebellion) and some analysis of methods (e.g. the gruesome imagery or the ‘unseam’ metaphor).
However, then the discussion would need to be developed to incorporate the big ideas implied by the question (masculinity and violence). There is an example of this below. As you read, notice how this part of the analysis is once again focussed on people in general, and not on Macbeth specifically, though it uses Macbeth as an example. This is the key principle to remember when writing about big ideas.
The celebration around Macbeth’s actions in this scene shows just how acceptable this kind of violence was for men at this time. The battlefield was where they showed their bravery and expertise – their manhood. None of the characters seem to flinch, as a modern audience may do, at the description of Macbeth’s brutality: it is what they expect, what they hope for. Macbeth is behaving in the way that a man in his position ought to behave, defending his country, vanquishing his enemy. This was, for some people, what it meant to be a proper man at this time. (For some people, this is still what it means to be a proper man, though, we have more reservations about this now.)
It is worth noting that, unlike the first example, this discussion of big ideas does not mention the writer.
Writing about ideas is not necessarily the same as writing about the message the writer is trying to communicate.
It just means explaining what the text reveals about people and the world, or about people and the world in the time at which the text was written.
Four additional examples of writing about big ideas
The last part of this guide will list a few examples of writing about big ideas to give you a clearer sense of what you need to do for this skill. Each example is just a simple PEA paragraph with a focus on big ideas in the analysis section. You should see that in each example the analysis goes from the specific (the text) to the general (big ideas). In each example the discussions of big ideas are highlighted in bold.
Example 1
Dickens uses A Christmas Carol to attack contemporary attitudes towards the poor and to encourage his readers to have more compassion. When the charity collectors tell Scrooge that many poor people would rather die than go to a workhouse or debtors’ prison, he replies that if they would like to die they had better do it and “decrease the surplus population.” Here, Dickens contrasts the compassion of the charity workers with the coldness of Scrooge. Dickens has Scrooge perpetuate an idea that was widespread then and remains so today: that poverty is self-inflicted, and that the poor suffer only as a consequence of their own laziness. In essence, Scrooge, like so many others, both then and now, suggests that the poor deserve to be poor, and, even worse, that death would be a suitable punishment because we’d all be better off without them. Dickens wants his readers to see the injustice of this attitude so that they’ll be more like the charity collectors and less like Scrooge.
Example 2
Shakespeare introduces the idea of evil and its dangers very early in the play, long before Macbeth’s corruption and downfall. After the witches’ first prophecy comes true, and Macbeth is named thane of Cawdor, Banquo warns him about the dangers that “the instruments of darkness” can present: “Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,” he claims, they “tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray us / In deepest consequence.” Here, Shakespeare suggests that evil is not always clear. Instead, evil people – including those with supernatural powers – can seem appealing in small ways (“honest trifles”) only to reveal their true motives – their true evil – when things matter most (“in deepest consequence”). In other words, the forces of evil can seem “fair” whilst being “foul.” The idea that duplicity is central to true evil runs all the way through the play, from the Witches and Lady Macbeth in Act 1 to Macbeth himself in Acts 3 and 4. The forces of evil lie and deceive, Shakespeare suggests, to trick good people into doing bad things.
Example 3
At the start of the novel, Dickens establishes that the rich are responsible for their own actions. This is made very clear in the first ghostly visitation: “I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge when asked to explain the chain that is wrapped around his body. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Here, Dickens shows just how much responsibility Marley has taken for his greed in life. He uses the repetition of both the pronoun ‘I’ and the phrase ‘of my own free will’ to emphasise that Marley and Marley alone is responsible for his punishment in the afterlife. This idea - that individuals have free will and are thus responsible for their own actions - is key to Dickens’ message in the text. The rich choose to ignore the suffering of the poor, Dickens suggests, and so they deserve any punishment that may be awaiting them in the life to come. However, at the same time, this freedom of will allows the rich the chance of redemption: they can choose to be better people, to live more honourably, charitably, more in keeping with Christian ideals - and thus they can be spared Marley’s fate, if they so choose. Either way, it is their choice because they have free will.
Example 4
In ‘Before You Were Mine’, Carol Ann Duffy conveys the possibility of youth, tinged with the cynicism and disappointment that comes with adulthood. The speaker of the poem imagines her mother, before the speaker herself was born, in “the ballroom with the thousand eyes”, looking ahead to “the fizzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring.” Through this, Duffy creates a powerful window into the speaker’s attitude towards youth, and the general sense she has of her own mother as a young person. First, we get the ballroom imagery, creating an immediate suggestion of glamour and fun, and at the centre of all this is the mother, who is the centre of attention with all eyes on her (and so many eyes – “a thousand”!). This optimistic image of youth is furthered by the abstract noun “tomorrows”, with its forward-looking, future-focussed connotations, further emphasised by both the “movie” imagery (more glamour, more romance and excitement – the future so many of us imagine is the future we see in film) and the enjambment: we are left on ‘tomorrows’ at the end of the line, as if the hope and optimism that this word implies are at the forefront of the mother’s mind at this point in her life. However, there is a cloud looming. The adjective ‘fizzy’ has glamorous connotations, with its links to champagne, but it also hints at the evanescence of youth: the fizz won’t last forever; adult flatness will inevitably follow. The line ends ambiguously with the modal verb ‘could’. It conveys the contingency of everything at this point in life: nothing is certain or guaranteed, all is simply possibility. This is both the beauty and the tragedy of youth – it could lead to a life of joyful wish-fulfilment, or it could lead to a life of interminable mediocrity. But the speaker is imagining her mother before this result has been decided, when she still has her whole life ahead of her.
Summing up – key things to remember when trying to write about big ideas
You need to write not just about what happens in the text but about what the text tells us about real people and the real world.
One way to think about this is to ask the question: What would an alien who knew nothing about human life learn from your essay about what it means to be a human being?
Big ideas should be the focus of your argument in Literature essays.
You should make ideas-based points whenever possible; this is essential for ideas-based questions.
All analytical paragraphs should have some discussion of big ideas.
Writing about big ideas does not require writing about the writer’s message, though writing about the message will involve writing about big ideas.