Creating a perceptive, sustained argument is what separates Grade 9 literature essays from average ones. Rather than treating your essay as a list of independent points, you need a central thesis that drives your analysis forward and responds directly to Priestley's social commentary.

This video breaks down what top-band examiners across all exam boards (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, etc.) are looking for when marking your arguments. We will unpack the exact criteria required to be perceptive, evaluative, and exploratory in your responses. I’ll also give you practical strategies for sustaining your thesis across every paragraph so your essay stays focused, insightful, and unified from start to finish.

Timestamps
0:00 what is an argument?
4:50 what do exam boards want?
12:20 How to be perceptive
13:59 How to be evaluative
23:38 How to be exploratory
24:45 How to sustain your argument

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There are also resources to help you in the Study Materials section:

An Inspector Calls Vocabulary Bank

The words in this vocabulary bank will help you to develop a more sophisticated and high level understanding of the key ideas and concepts in 'An Inspector Calls'.

As well as providing a range of words, their definitions and an example sentence, this book also suggests a number of activities that you can use to revise and put the vocabulary into practice.

Bonus - it's completely free!

An Inspector Calls AQA GCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)

This resource will have model answers for multiple years of AQA past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.

An Inspector Calls Edexcel IGCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)

This resource will have model answers for multiple years of Edexcel past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.

An Inspector Calls Flipped Learning (Coming soon!)

This resource is designed for teachers and students: it is a workbook designed to be completed alongside all of my An Inspector Calls videos. It is essentially a structured way for you to take notes and ensure that you are squeezing every ounce of advice my videos have to offer.

I fully intend to add more videos and study materials on this play. If there's something in particular you're looking for, then register and get in touch to let me know what would help you.

Lesson Transcript:

Hello everybody, it's Mrs. Wear of Stream English here, and today I'm going to be talking to you about how to get your argument in An Inspector Calls essays to be at that very highest Grade 9 level.

Now, I'm not trying to suggest that all you need to do to get a Grade 9 in your Inspector Calls essay is watch this video and do what it says, because ultimately in English, it's pretty easy to say what you need to do; it's much harder to actually do it. So, you might find that if you are struggling with the key skills that I keep saying you need to demonstrate in order to get the Grade 9 argument, you might find you also need to watch some of my other videos as well to get help there. So make sure you keep an eye out for if I mention any particular skills and you think, "Ooh, I don't know how good I am at that," make sure you have a look at my other videos so you can get some more help, too.

Let's do this!

The first thing we have to ask ourselves is: what do we mean by an argument? If we think about essays in English, they are not about stating facts, okay? I mean, obviously, the things that you say that are factual need to be true: you can't kind of make up who wrote the text, or make up what year it was performed. But ultimately, what essays are about is exploring the ideas in a text. And the argument of your essay is your idea about that text.

Now, of course, the idea that you're going to be talking about is centered around a specific question that you've been asked—whether that be a question on character, like "How is Sheila presented?", or a question on theme, like "How does Priestley explore the theme of social responsibility?" Essentially, the examiner is asking you: what are your ideas on this topic? Because there's no set one answer; there's lots of different ways of exploring it. So you're looking to narrow down to the path you want to look at, and explore that.

Now, what I mean by there being multiple different paths: let's say we take the character of Sheila. If you had a question that was just "How is Sheila presented?", there are a few different things you could look at:

You could look at Sheila as being the younger generation, and how her development is a symbol of how the younger generation are able to change while the older generation are stuck in their ways.
You could look at the kind of gender and feminist angle, and her as a middle-class woman and how she is limited by the sexism of the time, but also how her class gives her a certain kind of level of opportunity or freedom—however you want to word it—that the likes of Eva as a working-class woman does not get.
You could also look at Sheila in the sense of being a symbol for British society as a whole, and the progress British society has made between 1912 and 1945—how society has progressed, and they can see that in how Sheila progresses.
If we go back again to feminism and gender, we could see how Sheila is perhaps representative of first-wave feminism, and the kind of change that women were going through from being very much under the yoke of the patriarchy to becoming much more independent and fighting for what they want.

There's loads of different angles there, and we haven't even covered all the ones we could talk about! And when you're trying to write an Inspector Calls essay, you're not going to be able to cover all of those; that's way too much to talk about in 40 to 50 minutes. So your argument is not just about your idea in answer to the question, but also: of all the potential things you could talk about to do with this question, what's the path that you've decided to go down? Some teachers refer to this as, like, the line of inquiry: you are looking at one thing, and you're investigating that one thing, and that is what's going to help make your essay really tight and focused.

So basically, in that sense, what this video is doing is giving you that guidance on how you can make sure that that idea you choose to focus on, that path you choose to investigate in your essays, is a high-quality idea to be going for.

Let's have a look, then, at how all the different exam boards define a high-quality argument. What I've got here are the descriptions from the very highest level of the mark scheme for the Inspector Calls question for maybe not all of the exam boards, but I feel like I've got a pretty darn good spread covered here:

OCR say that your high-level argument would show a "perceptive and sensitive understanding of context and how it informs evaluation of the text."
AQA say that you have a "critical, exploratory, conceptualized response to task and whole text."
Edexcel say you have a "critical style developed with maturity, perceptive understanding and interpretation with discerning choice of references to text."
WJEC have a ridiculously long sentence that I will just read the first sentence of: "Evaluate characters, relationships and attitudes/motives."
CCEA: "Evaluative response, sustained argument." (WJEC could learn a thing or two from CCEA!)
And then Cambridge International: "Sustains a critical understanding of the text showing individuality and insight; sustains personal and evaluative engagement with tasks and texts."

So I just read a whole bunch of stuff there that's probably got you thinking—kind of, to be honest, what some English teachers think when they read mark schemes—just: what does all that mean? It kind of feels like you're on The Apprentice and there's people talking about the synergy and dynamism of their collective solitude! Sure.

To explain, then, what these mark schemes actually mean, there are four key words that are patterns across all the different exam boards:

The first is the word perceptive. We see that a lot: perceptive and also insightful. What do they mean by that? Well, to be perceptive and insightful is an incredibly elusive thing, quite difficult to do, but it essentially means that you are looking at the text in a way that others aren't: you're looking at things on a much deeper, more complex level than others do.

For example, if you've got a classroom of 30 people and 29 of them are very cleverly pointing out that Eric likes to drink—that's not very perceptive; it's fairly obvious in the play, everybody's saying it. But you've then got that one person in the room who's being like: Eric likes to drink as a means of trying to cope with his difficult relationship with his father. Suddenly, you've got one person who's saying something everybody else isn't, and is showing a deeper understanding because they're understanding why he drinks.

Now, that was not a brilliant example in terms of actually writing Grade 9 arguments, but it does convey my point: being perceptive is about answering the question why. Why is it presented like that? Why does that happen? Why does Priestley do that? Why is it structured in that order? Why is that language used? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? So in general, a nice little clue that you're along the right lines in terms of having a perceptive argument is that you're constantly saying things like "because," "because," "because" (of the wonderful things he does—sorry, Winnie the Pooh reference, couldn't help myself!). And also if you're saying things like: "This is significant because...", "This is important because...", "Priestley does this because...".

That also links to our second word that comes up really commonly across these explanations of a high argument, and that is the word evaluation. Evaluation is when you are not just saying something is something, but you are exploring the extent to which something happens. So rather than just being like, "Oh yeah, I 100% know there is no question the way Eric behaves is 100% only because he's a man"—fine. However, if you were evaluating, you would judge all the different possible reasons it could be, and then try to explore which you feel is the most significant:

Maybe Eric behaves the way he does because of his relationship with his father.
Because of his struggles to fit into gender expectations of masculinity.
Because he feels powerless in his own life and therefore needs to take power from others as a way of feeling that power.
Because of his struggles with alcohol.
Because of his middle-class upbringing making him feel like he can take others for granted.

And you kind of judge: it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, rather than just saying, "It is this, and it's nothing else, I'm done." So, you want to make sure that you are evaluating because you're looking at: could be this, could be this, could be this. And I'm going to go in more detail in a second on how you can do that, as well.

Our third most common word that we're seeing—it varies in how exactly it's said from exam board to exam board, but basically they're looking to see that you're exploring the text; you're going into a lot of detail. And basically, what they mean by that is you're not just talking about one chunk of the text. One of the best ways to be going for that Grade 9 argument, especially with An Inspector Calls, is tracking characters and themes across the play. Because if you can tell me what Mr. Birling is like at the very beginning of the play before the Inspector arrives, and then you can tell me what Mr. Birling is like when the Inspector is there, and then you can tell me is he the same or is he different, and then you can tell me why Priestley has made him the same or made him different—suddenly, you are looking at the play in way more detail and depth than somebody who just looked at Mr. Birling right at the very beginning before the Inspector arrived. So when you're looking at your Inspector Calls argument, you want to make sure that it's drawing from across the play, not just one specific part. And again, I'm going to look in more detail at how to do that.

And then finally, another common word that comes up a lot is sustain. That's probably the biggest challenge to the Grade 9 argument: you can't just do it once. You have to be able to do everything—the perceptive, the evaluative, the exploratory—you have to be able to do it for basically the whole essay. So the challenge there is in trying to sustain.

So that's basically what all the exam boards mean. Even though they've all worded it in slightly different ways, there are still four things that they're really looking for: they're looking for you to be perceptive, they're looking for you to evaluate (some of them have called it being critical), they are looking for you to explore, and they are looking for you to be able to do those three things throughout the whole essay.

Next, we'll have a little bit more look at each of these words individually and how you can actually then apply that in an An Inspector Calls essay.

Now, when you've got a question on a character, you might have often been taught to kind of come up with adjectives that you could use to describe that character. For example: "Sheila at the start of the play is naive." Pretty simple, I'm sure you're very familiar with doing that. However, that isn't yet perceptive because, as I explained earlier, it's not exploring the deeper levels, the complexity behind her character, and it's not yet looking at the why.

So, there's a couple of different ways that we can push our argument from this basic level of "a character is, you know, naive and follows along with her parents" to something much more perceptive.

The first way is to link a character's presentation back to symbols, themes, and/or context:

For example: "Sheila is naive because she symbolizes pre-feminism women and how they were very much under the control of the patriarchs in their lives, and therefore didn't have much understanding of the world for themselves."
Or: "Sheila is naive in order to explore the class system and how ignorant many in the middle classes are to the exploitation of the working classes."

So we take our idea—"Sheila is naive"—and we take it from a 60 to a 100 by linking it back to the themes, the context, or the symbols.

An example of the symbols would be with Mr. Birling: the fact that he symbolizes his greedy behavior. "Mr. Birling is greedy and selfish" is made much more perceptive by saying: "...as a symbol of capitalism, which J.B. Priestley is trying to criticize." So again, we take those adjectives we've used to describe a character and we make them more perceptive by linking back to symbols, themes, context. Easy, right?

When it comes to looking at being perceptive with themes, this is a tough one with An Inspector Calls, because, to be honest with you, An Inspector Calls just isn't that complex a play. However, it is still possible, again with those links to context:

If you can really examine why Priestley is exploring that theme via the context and how that is kind of informing what he's doing—context of production—then you're going to be looking at something more perceptive.
Similarly, if you're able to analyze how his audience are going to respond to that theme—context of reception—then you're going to be looking at something more perceptive as well.

In general, though, I would say that the perceptiveness when you're dealing with a question on theme is going to come less from your argument and more from your analysis, because your argument might be something that just shows you clearly understand the theme. You know, so for example: "Priestley suggests that there is not enough social responsibility in 1912 British society, and we need to have more of it." Perfectly sound idea, not necessarily perceptive. However, how I then prove that through analysis could become perceptive because of the detail that I go into with my analysis, how bomb my quotes are that I've picked as well, and the range of quotes that I look at. So I would also say that a perceptive argument goes hand-in-hand with perceptive analysis: you want to have that detailed, exploratory analysis to go with your argument, and the two will marry together and make beautiful essay babies!

With evaluate: sometimes the question is your best friend and really pushes you towards that. What I mean is if the phrasing of the question is "To what extent is...", you know: "To what extent is Eva a victim?" or something like that. Those questions are your best friend because they are, within the question, asking you to evaluate; they're giving you that room to be like: well, she is a victim like this, but she's not a victim like that.

However, sometimes—in fact, most of the time—you won't get a "To what extent" question. You'll get: "How does Priestley use language to explore X?", "How does Priestley explore X?", "How is the theme of X presented?", "How is X character presented?"

However, just because that "To what extent" isn't in the question doesn't mean your argument shouldn't be a "To what extent" argument. You want to have that wherever possible. And there's a couple of ways that you can have the "To what extent" argument:

Firstly, if you're dealing with character, then you can have a "To what extent" argument by looking at the extent to which they fit into an adjective. For example: "To what extent is Sheila immature and naive?" Now, on the surface level, you might be thinking, "Well, yeah, she is. I've got, you know, the 'Now I really feel engaged' quote where I can analyze that," whatever. But I would point out the stage directions right at the beginning of the play where she's half serious, half playful when talking to Gerald about him staying away from her. And I would analyze how those stage directions perhaps suggest she does have more sophisticated, complex feelings, but she also masks them behind the gender expectations of being this kind of light and casual and happy girl. And therefore, maybe she isn't as naive as she presents herself; she's kind of more just trying to live up to that cutesy, naive stereotype of what women are supposed to be like. And suddenly, I'm being much more perceptive and evaluative, because I'm not saying she definitely is naive; I'm saying she is naive in these ways, but we could also say she's not naive in these ways. So that's our first way of evaluating: to what extent does a character kind of fit into a question keyword, or just an adjective that you've come up with.

The other way that you can be evaluative is by looking at the multiple reasons for something: the multiple reasons why Priestley might have explored something, why Priestley might have presented a character a particular way, or the multiple reasons why a character might be the way that they are (like the example I talked about earlier with Eric and why he behaves the way he does towards Eva). So there's a couple of different ways there, and you just want to explore: you know, this could be the reason, but you could also argue this is the reason, or you could also argue this is the reason as well. And that's being evaluative. So you want to make sure your argument is thinking about to what extent. It's not "it is this" or "it is that"—it's the 50 shades of... I'm not going to finish that sentence, I'll let your brain do that for you!

When you're trying to evaluate for a theme, it's a bit different to when you're evaluating for a character, because obviously there's no question of: does this theme exist in this play? It absolutely does, that's unquestionable. But I think what you can evaluate is:

How significant the theme is to the play as a whole.
And second of all, how important the theme is at different points of the play, too.

For example, we know that social responsibility is arguably one of the most important themes in the entire play. But before the Inspector arrives, social responsibility barely gets looked at, because that's kind of Priestley's point, right? This is 1912 society before they've had their eyes opened by the Inspector, and therefore caring about other people is barely on their radar. If anything, it's the opposite: caring about themselves and individualism is on their radar. And so what you're then able to do is judge how the significance of a theme changes as the text goes on. And that links to that idea of being exploratory as well, because you're kind of tracking the entire play and how a theme develops as the play goes on.

Similarly, if we take something like the theme of gender: gender is not necessarily the biggest theme in the play. A lot of people talk about it a lot because of the fact that Eric is clearly dealing with toxic masculinity, and the fact that Eva and Sheila and Mrs. Birling experience a lot of sexism and all that kind of oppression, which is absolutely fine. But one of the things you can do to make your exploration of gender much more evaluative is ask yourself: what was Priestley's intention here? Is Priestley a feminist, or is Priestley a socialist and ergo a feminist? Like, is gender the point, or is the point equality for all, including women?

And in that sense, you're starting to evaluate because you're thinking about, on this really almost sophisticated level, how significant is the theme. And yes, you might be able to argue gender is significant because socialism is significant and the equality that people need to have is significant. But on the other hand, you could argue that examining the patriarchy per se is not Priestley's point: examining the class system is Priestley's point. And actually, one of the flaws that we see if we think about An Inspector Calls through a gender lens is: Eva is still not getting her own voice, still not getting to fight for herself. A man, in the form of the Inspector, has to do it for her. And the Inspector himself has lines where he talks about her in a kind of simplistic way, as if, you know, she was a pretty girl that died. He's guilty himself of having these kind of lines where he's not looking at Eva as a complex, sophisticated human being in her own right; he's looking at her as a victim, essentially.

So there's room to evaluate there: how does that kind of analysis that you could do suggest that gender is really what Priestley is trying to explore, versus actually he's not deeply trying to explore gender, he's just exploring equality for all as a whole, and that includes gender as part of it? So that's where your evaluation comes in there.

And just like I said before with being perceptive, notice how it's the analysis that's the key as well. There is no point having this full-mark Grade 9 argument if you're then not going to have the analysis to back it up: you have to have the Grade 9 analysis to back it up too. So it's the argument that gets your foot in the door; it's the analysis that's going to push you all the way through the door.

Explore. Explore is all about tracking. By tracking, I mean that you take the character you're looking at, or you take the theme that you're looking at, and you follow it across the course of the play.

This is a really nice, easy way for how you can structure your essay, too:

Start by looking at the play before the Inspector arrives.
Then look at the play when the Inspector is there.
Then look at the play after the Inspector has left.

Each time looking at the same character: Sheila before, during, and after; the theme of social responsibility before, during, and after. By structuring your argument in that way, it's going to force you to have that exploratory element because you're covering the entire play.

It can also help you with being perceptive, because if you sort of start to compare how things have changed and developed as the play has gone on, you can start pushing yourself into that more complex, more detailed, more insightful way of looking at the play. It could also help you with the sustain, because you're preparing in advance how you're going to keep this argument running throughout your entire essay.

Finally, sustain. This one is a tough one because, like I've said already, the skills I've been talking about are not an easy thing to keep going for a whole 50 minutes. But for the record, I totally believe in you: I totally think you can do it if you plan.

If you plan! You have no idea how many students just start writing an essay with no idea where they're going with it. You need to sit down—well, okay, you're probably already sitting because you're in an exam or something, but you get what I mean—you need to stop, and you need to think, and you need to make some notes.

Even if it's just making notes on the three things—the perceptive, evaluative, exploratory kind of points that I've made today—and ask yourself:

What's my perceptive argument? Okay, so what are my initial adjectives for how this character is presented? How am I going to make that more perceptive by linking to themes and context?
How am I going to make it exploratory by looking at before the Inspector arrives, during the Inspector's investigation, and after the Inspector has gone?
How am I going to make it evaluative by looking at the multiple reasons why something happens, or looking at the significance of something, or whatever?

Ask yourself: what is my argument, and how am I going to follow that argument through?

You also want to ask yourself: how am I going to prove this argument? Because I'm going to say this one more time, because I cannot stress it enough: if you do not prove your argument, it does not matter if it was Grade 9, you aren't going to get a Grade 9, because you have to have the analysis. You have to show you're not just pulling ideas out of your butt and hoping it sticks; you have actually thought about this and you can prove that your ideas are valid.

So you have to make sure that you start with that skeleton of: what's my argument going to be? What is it that I want to say? And then you plump it up, you give it the muscle, you give it the fat, you give it the skin, by thinking about: what are my quotes going to be? What am I going to analyze in those quotes? How am I going to link it back to context?

And if you want more help on the analysis side of things, then just watch so many potential other videos for that, depending on what kind of analysis you want help with. But, you know, if it's analysis in general, start with my "What is analysis?" video and then go from there.

But you need to make sure you're planning your essay, and planning how you're going to go through that kind of exploratory, perceptive, evaluative idea. And make sure you see it through to the end and prove every single element of it!

Write a GCSE grade 9 argument for your essay

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