Here are example passages with questions aimed at improving your ability to answer imagery questions.
Remember to identify and break down the image. Use the ‘Just as…so too’ formula to help you analyse the image.
How to survive the age of distraction
Johann Hari writing in the Independent
Johann Hari reflects on a science-fiction novel he has been reading about an imagined world where books have been forgotten:
I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flat, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice and insist that I just couldn’t bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1,000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard such people as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost?
The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.
Qi. Show how the writer’s imagery makes clear the number of books he possesses. (2)
Qj. How does the writer use imagery to make clear the threat to the paper book? (2)
The Passion of Morrisey–extract 3
Chloe Veltman writes about the reaction of the audience to the stage performance of the British singer, Morrisey:
The gladioli are in flight. On the stage of the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, a slender man in heavy 1950s style eye-glasses, floral shirt, white jeans and pompadour hairdo is energetically hurling a bunch of gangly blooms into the audience whilst singing something about spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. In the auditorium, tough-looking twenty-somethings in cuffed jeans, baseball boots and voluminous quiffs, sing word-perfectly along, their eyes shining as they strain to catch the somersaulting stems like blushing bridesmaids outside a country church.
Gradually, the adoration turns into unabashed devotion, as people try to clamber onto the stage. Those that make it past the heavy-set bouncers cling desperately onto their pop idol like lepers begging for a miracle.
Qk. How does the writer use imagery to suggest that the ‘tough-looking twenty-somethings’ are not as tough as they appear? (2)
Ql. Identify and explain the imagery by which Veltman makes clear the strength of fans’ ‘devotion’. (2)
FOR A PRINTABLE COPY CLICK BELOW FOR THE LINK AND THE PASSAGE WILL DOWNLOAD.
Miss Tomelty: National 5 English 