WRITING AND CHOOSING EVIDENCE
How to choose good evidence for an essay
Choosing evidence well is one of the most important and most under-rated of all the essay-writing skills. This guide will explain why it’s so important and then take you through the two key criteria which you need to bear in mind when choosing evidence: relevance and meaningfulness.
This guide is part of the Writing and choosing evidence series:
How to choose good evidence
Why this is important
Choosing evidence is important because, no matter how good you are at embedding quotations or analysing methods or even linking analysis to big ideas or context, if you choose bad evidence to analyse then your analysis will never be very good, and it will probably be bad. You can only write good analysis if the evidence it’s based on is good.
Fundamentally, there are two criteria which your evidence needs to meet in order for it to be good and thus lead to good analysis: it must be relevant and it must be meaningful. This guide will take each of these two criterion in turn, explaining what each one means before outlining how you should apply it when writing an essay.
Choosing evidence for relevance - the most important thing
This criterion is the first one because it’s the most important. Above all, any evidence you include must be relevant. But relevant to what? Well, there are several things to consider here, each of which might sound self-evident, but you should still read this part of the guide. It’s amazing how often students’ evidence choices do not fulfil these three aspects of relevance.
Your evidence must be relevant to the question. This is the most obvious of the criteria, and as such it doesn’t need explaining. But the part that students often fail to recognise is that, not only must it be relevant to the question, it must be as relevant as possible, and not just somewhat relevant. This is particularly important when choosing evidence from larger texts (not just extracts). Which act and scene from Macbeth best exemplifies Lady Macbeth’s manipulative behaviour? Which episode from Lord of the Flies best shows Golding’s bleak view of human nature? Which of the early visitors to Scrooge’s office are the best ones to exemplify Scrooge’s miserly personality in A Christmas Carol? When do we first see Grandma’s change in behaviour in A Monster Calls? These questions are not easy to answer. It is relatively easy to recall a scene in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth is manipulative, but some scenes are definitely better than others if you’re answering a question on the relationship between the Macbeths, for instance. The same applies to every other text and every other conceivable question. This is why you need to revise carefully and know the texts you have studied inside and out.
Your evidence must be relevant to your argument, both in the essay as a whole and also in any given paragraph. And it must be as relevant as possible to this, not just somewhat relevant. This is related to the previous type of relevance, but it’s also somewhat separate. If you wanted to argue that Lady Macbeth’s manipulation is done out of love for her husband, for example, and not just self-interest, then the best evidence would be different than if you wanted to argue that she is a malevolent force who instigates her husband’s downfall. Ultimately, your evidence needs to support your paragraph point, and by extension, your overall argument (or thesis). Where people often go wrong here is, again, related to revision. Too often students revise a set of quotations for an exam and then they go into it knowing that they will fit those quotations into their essay somewhere, no matter what. This is not the right approach. It means the quotations included in the essay are not as relevant as they should be; they don’t really show what the student is trying argue in their essay. This is why you need to bear relevance in mind at all times when writing an essay. Don’t toss it out of the window just so you can fit in your favourite quotation.
Your evidence must be relevant in relation to the other evidence in the paragraph. It needs to build on what’s gone before, not just repeat it. This final aspect of relevance is the most difficult to do. It’s also something we discuss more in our guide to extending a paragraph with more evidence and analysis. However, for completeness’ sake, a brief explanation will be included here. When you’re choosing a second or third piece of evidence to go in a paragraph, you need to think about how it relates to what’s come before. Does your new bit of evidence just show the exact same thing as the previous bit? If so, perhaps you should find something else. You want your evidence to show a related but different thing – otherwise the analysis will just be a repeat of what’s gone before. It still needs to link back to your paragraph point, but it shouldn’t just be a second or third example of the same exact thing.
Choosing evidence for meaningfulness - the key to writing detailed analysis
This is a secondary consideration to relevance (irrelevant but meaningful evidence is still bad evidence), but it’s very important when it comes to writing your analysis. Meaningful evidence is evidence that is full of meaning. When you analyse a piece of evidence all you are really doing is explaining what it means, so if you want your analysis to be detailed (and you do) then your evidence needs to mean a lot. In other words, it needs to be meaningful. This is straightforward enough, but there are different ways that a piece of evidence can be considered meaningful, and this part of the guide will run through these, with examples.
Meaningfulness in terms of inference. This is the foundational aspect of meaningfulness. Is there something that you can infer from the evidence? Is there an implied meaning beyond the basic meaning? When trying to find evidence, students often look for quotations that clearly state something they want to argue for in an essay or PEA paragraph. So, if they want argue that a character is upset about something, they will find a quotation that says, “Peter was very upset.” The problem with this kind of evidence is that it contains no implied meaning. There is nothing to infer from it, so there’s nothing to analyse. What are you going to say? This suggests Peter is upset. Well, duh. (Moreover, if the text literally says that Peter was upset then it’s not a good thing to argue for in a paragraph point, as you’re stating the obvious - see the guide to writing paragraph points for more on this.) Instead, you need to find a piece of evidence that implies Peter is upset, without stating it clearly: “Peter looked away slightly as Sally spoke, masking his eyes in the shadow.” In this example the basic meaning is about where Peter is looking, but the implied meaning seems to be about why he looks this way: perhaps he doesn’t want Sally to see the pain in his eyes, maybe even the welling of tears. And from this attempt to hide his emotion, we could infer that Peter is perhaps embarrassed or ashamed of how he feels, which is yet more meaning. And maybe it reveals that he is concerned about his masculinity in front of Sally, which is yet more meaning. And so on. You get the idea. This is the first way that a quotation can be considered meaningful: it can contain lots of implied meaning.
Meaningfulness in terms of methods. [Only relevant for SHSG students in Year 8 and above.] Another way a quotation can contain extra meaning is through the use of language, form or structure methods. This kind of meaningfulness is especially important when you are being asked to choose quotations to analyse from an extract. You must look for methods when you’re choosing your quotations. For a much bigger discussion of what this means and how to do it, you should look at the separate guides to analysing methods, including which methods are best to analyse, but we’ll look at a quick example here just to make it somewhat clear. The most obvious example of a method to analyse would be a metaphor or a simile. Through methods like these, writers add a lot of extra meaning in relatively few words. Consider this example: Jane turns her head: her pale gaze is like a splash of cold water. From that 6-word simile (‘like a splash of could water’) we can extract a huge amount of meaning about what it feels like to be looked at by Jane, and what Jane herself is like as a person. This gives us a lot to say in our analysis. The same is true for other methods like personification, symbolism, juxtaposition and so on. When you’re choosing evidence to analyse, wherever possible you should choose evidence which contains at least one, if not multiple analysable methods. For lots of questions, especially at GCSE, you will be time-limited to analysing one or two quotations from a text. You need to make sure these quotations contain some methods which you can analyse.
Meaningfulness in terms of big ideas. [Only relevant for SHSG students in Year 8 and above.] Another way a piece of evidence could be considered highly meaningful is if it tells us something about one of the big ideas explored in a text. For a much bigger discussion of what this means and how to do it, you should look at the separate guide to linking analysis to big ideas, but we’ll look at a quick example here just to make it somewhat clear. The following quotation comes from the first chapter of Lord of the Flies, just after Ralph tells Piggy his name: “The fat boy [Piggy] waited to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made.” There are no good methods to analyse in this quotation, so it doesn’t meet the previous criterion of meaningfulness. There are inferences we can make – about Piggy being needy and desperate – so that’s something we could analyse. But what makes this quotation highly meaningful is that it tells us a lot about one of the key ideas from early in this novel: the way attractiveness and power go together. Golding is using Ralph’s casual rejection of Piggy – not done out of malice but out of a total lack of interest in this fat, working-class, bespectacled boy – to tell the reader something about how the world works, not just for children but for adults too. Explaining what this is would make an excellent piece of analysis. So this is another way that evidence can be considered meaningful: it can contain big ideas that tell us something about the human condition.
Meaningfulness in terms of context. [Only relevant for SHSG students in Year 9 and above.] The final way that evidence can be considered meaningful is if it tells us something about the context in which the text is set or was written. As with the two previous types of meaningfulness, there is a bigger discussion of this in the separate guide to writing about context, but we’ll just offer a very quick example here. In Stave 1 of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge tells the charity collectors that if poor people died, it would “decrease the surplus population.” There are no methods of note in this quotation, but we could make inferences from it about Scrooge and his personality, and we could link it to big ideas about the rich and the poor. But for this particular quotation, we can do more than that. We can link it in to the context of the text, providing we know that Dickens is quoting from Thomas Malthus. This historically contextual reference adds additional meaning to this quotation which we could analyse in our essay, making this quotation more meaningful than it might seem on the surface. So this is the final way that evidence can be considered meaningful: it could link to something outside of the text (e.g. another text or something from history) which we could discuss in our analysis.
In an ideal world, your evidence will include a mixture of several of the different types of meaning above. The purpose of this guide is not to get you to look for one or other of these types of meaning at the expense of the others. You should be looking for all of them. The very best evidence will contain implied meaning, methods to analyse, links to big idea and links to context. Imagine how big your analysis would be in that situation? That is the dream. We hope you get to live it one day.
Evidence without quotation - GCSE advice
There is an important difference between the evidence part of an essay and the idea of quotation from the text, namely that evidence does not necessarily need to include quotation. This is very important at GCSE because the exams are closed-book (e.g. you don’t have the text to refer to).
AQA, the exam board we use for GCSE, never discuss quotations in their feedback, they only talk about ‘references’. They want you to be able to point towards specific bits of each text and say what it means and how it supports your argument in relation to the question. You are marked for this in what AQA call ‘AO1 REFS’. But you don’t need to learn quotations from the text in order to do this. You just need you to learn what happens in each text really well. This is what the exam board are looking for: know the text well.
Evidence with quotation - the standard thing
Most of the time your evidence will include a quotation embedded into a context setting sentence. This will allow you to discuss the precise moment in the text, and it will allow you to analyse it based on the language used by the writer. This is the thing you will practise doing a lot at KS3 and something you need to be totally comfortable doing.
Evidence without quotation - making precise references to the text
Sometimes, however, you may want to talk about a particular plot point in a text, or a series of different plot points in the text and analyse those points without a particular quotation. This is perfectly fine. In fact, this is an essential thing to do if you want to write essays which really cover a whole text, rather than just analysing a series of moments, through quotation, and not discussing the wider text.
The process for doing this is exactly the same as it is for writing evidence with quotations: you just do it by summarising the events of the text without actually including a quotation. This is pretty straightforward, but there are a couple of examples below to help you get your head around it.
A point and some evidence without quotation: In ‘An Inspector Calls’, Priestley uses Shelia to show how powerless and accepting of their powerlessness middle class women were in the Edwardian period. When Gerald gets out the engagement ring for Sheila during the exposition in Act 1, she asks if it's the one he wanted her to have.
From this evidence, you could analyse what this part of the play reveals about Sheila and Gerald, and how this conveys the big ideas in the point.
Another point and some evidence without quotation: Shakespeare uses Macbeth’s early kingship to emphasise the extent to which power can corrupt a person. In the opening scenes of Act 3, Macbeth is a totally changed man, plotting to murder his best friend, manipulating the feeble murderers into do his bidding by questioning their manhood and keeping all of his diabolical plans a secret from his wife.
From this evidence you could discuss how much Macbeth has changed since Act 1 and even Act 2 of the play, and how his behaviour shows a kind of role reversal with the behaviour of his wife; he is behaving in the way she did at the start of the play. And so on…
Relevance and meaningfulness does not necessarily mean quotation
The point of these two examples is just to demonstrate that evidence can be both relevant and meaningful without necessarily including an actual quotation. You can even analyse methods without quotation by talking about methods like characterisation.
Summing up – key things to remember when choosing your evidence
Your evidence must be relevant to the question – it must be the best bit of the text
Your evidence must be relevant to the overall argument and paragraph point – don’t just crowbar in the quotations you’ve memorised
Your evidence must be relevant within the paragraph – don’t just repeat yourself
Your evidence must be full of meaning since meaning is what you explain in the analysis
Meaning can come from inference – it can be implied meaning
Meaning can come from methods – figurative language is particularly useful for this
Meaning can come from big ideas which the writer is communicating through the text
Meaning can come from links to contextual factors outside the text
Relevance and meaningfulness does not necessarily mean that you have to use a quotation in your evidence - it is possible to analyse parts of a text without quotation