How to write a top-grade essay

Shakespeare presents ambition not as a strength but as an infection: something Macbeth recognises, names and then allows to destroy him. Writing for a king who had survived the Gunpowder Plot only months before, Shakespeare shows regicide ruining the man who commits it from the inside.

A short introduction that gives the big idea at once, with context that explains why it matters. No plot summary, no “In this essay I will”.

Early on, Macbeth understands exactly what he is doing, which is what makes him tragic. In his soliloquy he has ‘no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition’. The metaphor pictures a rider leaping so hard that he falls on the other side of the horse, so the warning is built into the image. Because the audience hears this alone with him, they watch him see the danger and walk into it anyway.

Starts with an argument, not a feature. The quotation is explained in detail. The form (soliloquy) is used to say what it does for the audience.

By the end, the ambition that promised everything has emptied him. The repetition in ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ drags like the days he has to live through, and life becomes ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The man who killed for the future now sees no meaning in it. That final word is the real punishment: Shakespeare doesn’t only show Macbeth losing the crown, but finding that it was never worth having.

Moves to the end of the play, showing how the idea develops. Sound and repetition are explored. The final sentence adds a new thought rather than repeating the point.

Ultimately, Shakespeare uses Macbeth to warn his audience that the desire for power can’t be satisfied by getting it. Macbeth reaches the top of the Great Chain of Being and finds that there’s nothing there.

A short conclusion that sums up the writer’s purpose, instead of repeating the essay. It ends on a strong final line.

Dickens makes Scrooge’s change feel earned by writing the opening of the story and its ending as mirror images. In Stave 1 he’s ‘solitary as an oyster’, a simile that suggests something shut tight, hard on the outside and closed to everyone. By Stave 5 he’s ‘as light as a feather’ and ‘as merry as a school-boy’, and the rush of similes is itself a release: the sentence can’t contain him any more than his old life can.

An idea about how the book is built (structure), proved with quotations from the start and the end.

Writing in 1843, Dickens needed this change to feel possible for his readers. If a man as far gone as Scrooge can change in one night, then the comfortable Victorian reader has no excuse.

Context as part of the argument: why the writer needed the change to feel this way. Two sentences are enough.

Priestley uses the Inspector as a voice for his own beliefs, and the timing is the point. Written in 1945 but set in 1912, the play gives its audience a terrible kind of knowledge: when the Inspector warns of ‘fire and blood and anguish’, they have already lived through two world wars. The three nouns build like a sermon, but the audience knows it isn’t only a threat: it came true. So the play makes them feel what the Birlings refuse to feel, that ignoring our responsibility for each other has a cost that’s paid by everybody.

Uses dramatic irony and the play’s two dates as one idea. Only a few words are quoted, and each of them is analysed. Context is the whole argument here, which is why it works.

Both poets expose powerful men through their own words, but Shelley shows power being destroyed by time, whereas Browning shows it still at work. Ozymandias’s boast ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ was once a threat, yet the ‘lone and level sands’ around it turn it into a joke, and the soft, spreading alliteration seems to erase him. In contrast, the Duke in Browning’s poem needs no boast at all. ‘I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together’ is chillingly short, and the semi-colon is the only pause he allows between ordering a death and describing it. The dramatic monologue traps us in the room with him, so while Shelley lets us feel relieved that tyrants pass, Browning leaves us with one who’s still talking.

Compares from the first line. Each poet gets a quotation and a method, and the “whereas” joins two ideas. The last sentence compares the effect on the reader, which is the top-level move.