A2 Comms - A grade answer to the formal assessment

A2 Comms - The Christmas lesson

John Lewis Christmas 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSLOnR1s74o

Allegro (Polish) 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO6AUFdgcgU

M&S Christmas 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5QPXhStb5I

Harvey Nicols 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITyeI3YyYw8

Coca Cola 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inW_GcnCOgc


Student survey: please click here to give us some feedback for A2 Comms: 
http://p2.gg/fbe

A2 Comms - how to approach Section A of the exam

How to approach Section A of the exam

Here's a suggested structure we suggest you try out when writing your own answers (previous students have done really well using it):

1. Introduce the essay by briefly explaining the different viewpoints offered by A and B; say which of the perspectives will be most useful in helping you to analyse and evaluate them

2. Explain and analyse A, putting it into the context of the perspective that you think 'best fits' it. Use the discourse of the perspective explicitly within your analysis of A. Quote from A to help anchor your points.

3. Suggest the strengths and weaknesses of A as an argument.

4. Explain & analyse B, putting it into the context of the perspective you think has been used to shape it. Use the discourse of the perspective in your answer. Compare it to A - there may be similarities as well as differences. Quote from B to help anchor your points.

5. Conclude by reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of B, compared to A. You might want to use an alternative perspective to help you to do this.
We suggest that you spend at least 15 minutes reading the arguments, thinking & annotating, before you start writing.

A2 Comms: Objects of Desire homework

Click here to reach the TedEd homework on Objects of Desire.
If you don't want to create an account, you can write the answers in your book.

A2 Comms: Objects of Desire - Advertising

A2 Comms : Objects Of Desire / The Century of the Self

Recap from the 3 week return from last summer: watch the first half an hour and remind yourself of Bernays' contribution to the modern world of advertising:

A2 Comms & Culture: Globalisation

Globalisation explained:

If you need help with the homework, you can read a previous student's answer to the question here...

A2 Comms & Culture: District 9 and Post Colonialism

Please post two comments onto the Padlet wall (in two separate boxes) with your name at the top of each comment. Access the Padlet wall by clicking here...

A2 Comms - Post Colonialism extension work

Extension work: 

I really recommend that you listen to this radio programme about Multicultural Britain. It lasts about 30 minutes and features Stuart Hall, a leading Postcolonial academic (himself part of the Windrush generation). Click here to play the programme (it can't be downloaded, so do it on wifi).

A2 Comms & Culture : Immigration

Access the Immigration Padlet wall by clicking here.

A2 Comms - Frantz Fanon & Edward Said

Watch these two videos to consolidate your understanding of Fanon & Said:

Fanon

Said

A2 Comms: Oxford's 'students of colour' on being 'othered' at university

Read this:

Oxford students on 'otherness'

A2 Comms & Culture: The science of racism

Read this!

The Guardian: Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes

Applying Marxism: Metropolis (1927)

The following clip comes from Fritz Lang's film, 'Metropolis' (1927), a science fiction film set in an industrialised future, where society is characterised by the gulf between the workers (who live underground, maintaining the city) and the wealthy (who live above ground and enjoy the pleasures of life).

Watch the clip and see how you can apply Marxism...

A2 Comms & Culture: Introducing Post Colonialism

Kenya: A white man's country

A2 Comms: Consolidating alienation; hegemony & false consciousness

Alienation

Hegemony

False Consciousness

A2 Comms - Marxist analysis

Click below for:

Marxist analysis of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

Marxist analysis of Orange is the The New Black

A2 Comms: Mark Steel lecture on Karl Marx

Animal Farm

• Watch the first 11 minutes of the film
• Identify and write down the criticisms made by Old Major of life under Jones the farmer

Capitalism - consolidate and develop your understanding

A2 Comms - welcome back!

A2 Comms - welcome back!

Welcome back to A2 Comms  - this blog is the place to come for extra help as well as for extension work to push you harder.

There is a course book for A2, which you might want to buy:

AQA Comms & Culture (click here for link to Amazon)

If you are looking for other texts to buy to help support your study in the second year, you might consider the following:

Marx: a very short introduction (Amazon link)
Postcolonialism: a very short introduction (Amazon link)

Advice from previous A2 students: click here

GCSE English - Welcome to the course!

Welcome...

Our lessons will take place in 1D25 on:

Wednesdays at 9am (sharp!): this is a one hour lesson
Fridays at 12.50pm: this is a two hour lesson

My office is 1C2a.

Below is an overview of how you will be assessed - click on the image to make it bigger:

In addition, you will be completing a Speaking & Listening assessment, for which you will be graded Pass, Merit or Distinction.

AS Comms - sample exam answer

SAMPLE EXAM ANSWER

Question 1 (20 marks)

‘Popular culture is a form of cultural pollution, which undermines traditional values and standards.’

This viewpoint, which I will be supporting in this essay, stems from ideas relating to culture which can be traced back to Matthew Arnold. The idea that popular culture ‘pollutes’ culture suggests that traditional (high) culture needs to be protected from the superficial and disposable world of contemporary popular culture.

By separating culture from money, Arnoldsaw culture as an expression of creativity rather than as a mechanical production line shooting out cultural products for audiences to gobble up and then throw away when they become bored. I see culture as something which expresses a truth or an idea about humanity in a way which is not afraid to be challenging; the contemporary world of Big Brother and Heat magazine are two good examples of popular cultural products which threaten real (or ‘high’ culture).

The Channel 4 television show Big Brother presents a world where celebrity-status (however z-list) is the prize and where the journey is made up of trivial and mundane popularity contests. It offers absolutely nothing of value whilst attempting to create an ‘addiction’ of voyeurism and its cheap thrills. Meanwhile, while Channel 4 count the money as the advertising revenue rolls in, they also cut their funding of serious documentaries and weighty dramas and films because ‘good’ television cannot attract big enough audiences. This‘dumbing down’ of culture by programmes like Big Brother encourages audiences to lose their powers of concentration and their ability to think and be challenged. Presumably this is why Channel 4 is happy to screen Big Brother and its spin-offs on several channels, often at prime time, yet was not interested in purchasing the rights to the challenging, thought-provoking and critically acclaimed drama series The Wire (a drama of real cultural value).

Magazines like Heat feed off programmes like Big Brother in circulating interviews and photos of ex-contestants shopping in Tescos, promoting a culture of empty celebrity and encouraging people to sift through mindless pap rather than read a book or reflect on what might be important in life. Popular culture encourages to us to develop an interest in gossip rather than the news, in celebrity rather than humanity, and moulds us to expect culture to be easy to absorb.

A further example can be found in London’s theatre-land. Musicals fill theatres up and down Shaftesbury Avenue because they are popular and accessible. Meanwhile, directors have little chance of staging plays by both traditional and contemporary playwrights because audiences are used to a good tune to sing along to rather than 90 minutes of concentration and being challenged to think.

The victim here is real culture – anything genuinely challenging and interesting is being rejected in favour of easy, lazy consumption. Popular culture really is polluting our cultural world.

Question 2

Personal communication is much influenced by the gender of both senders and receivers. Consider gender’s specific influence on appearance. (20 marks)

It can be argued that the means by which we communicate with others is significantly influenced by our gender – our understanding of what it means to be male or female. This understanding has been learnt via agents of socialisation such as our family, the media and our peer group. According to Goffman, the ways we communicate – which includes our appearance – are aligned to how we choose to stage ourselves to the outside world. Our use of props -which may well include clothes, accessories and body art -communicate our self-image to others as well as the sub-cultural groups that we belong to. Perhaps above all, our appearance communicates our own understanding of ourselves (as we have learned it) as either male or female.

Traditionally, gender has been communicated through appearance in fairly structured ways. A good way of examining this is to consider the traditional school uniform: trousers, shirt and tie for boys, a skirt or dress for girls. These paradigmatic choices of clothing in themselves communicate an ideology relating to the differing roles of men and women in society as well as ideas about masculinity and femininity. Clothes were seen as a signifier of power (men) or domesticity (women). The changing perception of women as people who can take an equal role in the work-place means that in contemporary society it is now perfectly acceptable for women to wear trousers; however it is still pretty unusual to see a man dressed in a skirt or a dress in the work-place (or elsewhere in society, for that matter). Perhaps this suggests that the cultural codes governing male identity are more controlled than they are for women. If a man wears a skirt he is choosing to make a statement: one message being encoded by this choice of clothing could be that he is rejecting the stereotypical assumptions of masculinity. When David Beckham was photographed wearing a sarong a few years ago, he was both mocked and acclaimed by different sections of the media. Some receivers saw it as a healthy expression of a modern male identity, and a rejection of the burden of the stereotypical male image – others read his clothing choice more as a cynical attempt to appeal to the pink pound, or even as a comment on his own sexual orientation.

Makeup is another prop used differently depending on gender. For women, the cultural practice of wearing makeup has become normalised; it is almost expected that to present yourself as a ‘normal’ woman you must enhance your facial features in the form of this literal ‘mask’ (Goffman). Who this mask is for is debateable. Some women will claim that it is not to present themselves as more attractive to men but to enhance their own self-confidence. Of course, make-up also comes with its own cultural codes – too much and you are perceived as a slapper. The syntagm of what is means to be a man in western society does not include the wearing of make-up because make-up is a signifier of femininity. When men do choose to wear make-up it is probably a way of expressing their membership of a sub-cultural group (such as punks or Goths) where the boundaries of gender identity are allowed to be more blurred, or perhaps their sexual orientation.

Question 3 – cover of Finishing Touches book.

a) Who do you think is the audience for this text? (4 marks)

Judging by the paradigmatic choices made in constructing this book cover, we can infer that the audience being targeted is female, 25-45 and middle class with aspirational tastes.

b) Identify and briefly explain icons, indexes and symbols within this text. (6 marks)

Iconic signifers include the woman, the sofa & the fireplace – collectively they are used to signify a home – specifically, the lounge. The assumption is that it is a lounge the audience aspire to.

Indexical signifers include the positioning of the woman. The way she holds the cushion acts as evidence that this is herlounge. The outstretched hand in the direction of vase acts as evidence that she has just finished putting the ‘finishing touches’ to the tray. The two wine glasses on the mantelpiece act as evidence that two people - a couple – live in the home.

Symbolic signifiers include the two logos used to anchor the text (Changing Rooms and BBC). The flowers and wine can also be seen as symbolic signifiers of romance.

c) What does the room and its contents communicate about the woman’s identity? (10 marks)

The woman’s identity is being staged as a middle-aged, middle class home-maker. This has partly been created through the choice of female model, who is well groomed, slim and blond. It is also communicated through the props used to‘stage’ the woman’s identity: the minimalist furnishing of the room and its reliance on black & white colours which connote simplicity and sophistication. The paradigmatic choices made in selecting the fireplace, wine glasses & flowers help to create the syntagm of ‘the middle-class home’ – it all looks as though it has been plucked out of a Heals’ catalogue. This is what helps to communicate her socio-economic background. The books scattered on the hearth at the corner of the image signify an education and interest in the world. The carefully arranged lounge creates a calm, thoughtful and stylish identity for the woman. The choice of words such as ‘styling’ and ‘transform’ is also the language of women’s magazines, and helps to position the woman as the home-maker, anchoring her identity even further.

Question 4

Use your knowledge of communication and culture to explore the role played by self-knowledge in the creation and maintenance of personal identity. (20 marks)

 How well we know ourselves is an important factor to consider when assessing the creation and maintenance of our personal identity. According to Cooley, it is partly through other people – and their reactions to us – that we gain self-knowledge in the first place. His ‘looking glass’ theory suggests that we use other people as mirrors through which we can see ourselves reflected. For example, we might try out a new outfit when with a friend to judge their reaction; as a result we might judge that outfit to be a success or not.

Gaining information about ourselves in this way, and reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures allows us to control the way we want the world to see us. It allows us to refine and project a sense of personal identity which reveals ourselves in the way we want to be seen. This process of editing out aspects of our selves which might be perceived as negative is known as gate-keeping. Many people engage in this everyday as they create and maintain pages on sites like Facebook and Bebo. People carefully include information and photos which help to maintain a sense of personal identity that they are happy with.

We can apply the Johari window to this process. If we know ourselves effectively, we also know what to reveal in our‘open self’ and what to conceal in our ‘hidden self.’ It might be that the more familiar and comfortable we feel with people, the happier we are to reveal ourselves more honestly, and the more our ‘open self’ expands. However, what we can’t control is our ‘blind self’ - those things about our self that others know but we don’t, or our ‘unknown self’- those things about our selves which have yet to reveal themselves to us or to others. Our own self-knowledge depends to an extent on how honestly we manage the feedback we get from others. Many of us use various self-maintenance strategies (Gergen & Gergen) to minimise the effect of feedback we perceive to be negative (for example, by rubbishing those who gave the feedback: ‘what does my teacher know anyway’) , rather than using negative feedback to reflect honestly on ourselves.

This leads to an interesting point, which is that our sense of personal identity is not a static and unchanging concept. We can never know everything about ourselves and as we experience more of life our self-image and the identity we want to present to the world changes too. As Goffman says, the roles we play in life partly determine our identity, and when we are ‘new’ to a role, it makes sense that a lack of self-knowledge means that our ‘blind self’ is likely to be larger until we have learned who to be in that role, partly through the process of feedback. This often happens when someone starts a new job, for example.

In addition, the sub-cultural groups that we identify with in life may well change as time passes. Our identification with a particular cultural or sub-cultural group will certainly influence how we construct a sense of identity and then knowingly present it to the world, as anyone who has decided to become a goth or a punk knows.

AS Comms - Question 3 revision

AS Comms - Qu3 revision - My Butt is big

Let's think about:

- the use of icon, symbol and index in in this text. Can you find an example of each and briefly explain it?

- the use of anchorage. Read the copy again and analyse how it is being used to fix the meaning of the text (think also about tone, layout...)

- how Nike has chosen to represent women in this text (and why): which ideological beliefs is it challenging and supporting? How does it compare with how women are often represented in texts?

AS Comms - Question 3 example & model answer

AS Comms - Practice question 3 (semiotics)

1. Identify and briefly explain the use of icons, indexes and symbols in this text. (6)
Scan the codes below for suggested answers:

Indexes

Icons

Symbols

2. Comment on the use of anchorage within this text. (6)

3. How are Arsenal being represented within the text? (8)

AS Literature - revising the shorter poems

1. Spin the wheel.
2. For the poem selected, skim-read it again
3. Then write one paragraph about one stanza (or 6 consecutive lines), focusing closely on:

• the ideas being explored
• how language has been used to create these ideas
• using the appropriate literary terminology

AS Literature - The Simpsons do Streetcar

AS Comms - high culture or popular culture: which is best for educating students?

In this article from The Guardian, an RE teacher explores whether it is a good idea to use popular culture as a means of teaching. In doing so, some key ideas relating to high & popular culture are re-visited: worth a read...

AS Literature - Streetcar magic paper posters

Remember that the questions for next Friday's timed piece will be questions 2 & 9 from the Streetcar Revision Guide.

Today's mind-maps:

AS Literature: Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright

AS Literature - Blanche

Here's a good blog post on the downfall of Blanche in Streetcar.

AS Comms: cultural codes and cultural capital - revision

Cultural transmission:

The Wire - cultural capital

AS Comms - Groups

 In-group & out-group formation

Asch conformity experiment

Sherif's Robber Cave Study - group conflict

AS Lit: The April Challenge

A2 LangLit - final advice for the coursework - Part 2

Coursework deadline: Wednesday March 23rd 2016
9am - 12pm; 1E3

Remember that when you submit the final essay, you must also submit:

• your first draft
• the extracts/poems you have used for your essay - these can be annotated

1. Look again at your opening paragraph. Remember how crucial this is for setting up your argument. A reminder of what AQA say about this:

Highlight your own thesis. Does it narrow  down the parameters of what you are going to explore from the question? Does it give your essay a strong direction to move on from? Does the rest of your essay actually refer back to the thesis and develop an argument? Are you using topic sentences to hold your argument together?

2. Run through your essay with 2 differently coloured highlighters, identifying the parts of your essay that are about Blake's poetry and the parts of the essay which are about Death of a Salesman. Make sure that your essay is evenly balanced between the two & that you are rotating between the two texts.

3. Run through your essay again with a highlighter - this time, identify all of the moments where you make a comparative point, even if just briefly. Look closely at any sustained parts of your essay where there are no comparisons. Have you missed any opportunities?

4. Re-read your essay, focusing on your use of terminology. Are you demonstrating a wide vocabulary? Is your use of technical terms precise and accurate? Are you using literary & linguistic terminology? Are you using discourse analysis (where appropriate)?

5. Now think about context. Remember that context is measured in all sorts of ways. Have you contextualised the extracts from DOS that you are writing about? The poems you have chosen? The quotations you have selected? Where appropriate, have you embedded social, historical and literary context within your arguments?

Finally - a reminder of what you are being assessed on:

A2 Lang Lit - final advice for the coursework - Part 1

Coursework deadline: Wednesday March 23rd 2016
9am - 12pm; 1E3

Remember that when you submit the final essay, you must also submit:

• your first draft
• the extracts/poems you have used for your essay - these can be annotated

Basic checklist:

• Your name on every page
• Title/question at the top of page 1
• Page numbers
• Writers' names spelled correctly 
• Names of texts (always in full - no abbreviations) differentiated through use of italics, bold or '  ', with capital letters in the right place
• Verse quoted as verse, using / where the line break should be                              ('... so I said/Hush Tom never mind it')
• Single spaced; font size 12
• Word count at end - excluding quotations (yes - you will need to count!)
• Proofread carefully and run a spell check
• Blake's poetry = reader; Miller's drama = audience

AS Literature - poems we have studied so far (11th March)

AS Comms - How to finish your Moviemaker & turn it into a film

In order to 'finish' your Moviemaker so that it becomes a single movie file (which is what you will submit), you need to go through the following process:

1. Make sure your MM project is definitely complete - watch it through from start to finish, checking that your voiceover synchs with the images, that nothing is clipped off, and that you have faded your audio in and out so that your transitions are smooth.

2. When you are 100% happy, select the 'Save Movie' tab on the far right of the toolbar (below) & select 'Recommended for this project'.

3. Choose your Comms folder (on your student drive) as the destination for the file.

4. Click 'Save' and then a progress bar (see below) will appear mapping the progress of your project being converted into a movie file. Depending on how busy the network is / how big your project is, this can take quite a long time. It usually takes 5 - 10 minutes but can take 30 mins.

You then need to copy your movie onto your usb for the submission of the coursework (keep a copy on your student drive!)

AS Literature - revision notes on the poems

I stumbled across this English revision blog, which includes notes on the poems we are studying (written by students). You might find it useful - especially to catch up if you have missed a poem or two.

Genetics - blog post by Lisa & Ailbhe

Genetics by Sinead Morrissey

This poem talks about the importance of marriage and the celebrated relationship between a mother and father even though they have separated.  It talks about how even though the parents have separated; ‘the child’ is a representation of their marriage and love they had once shared. The poem ends with the narrator speaking to who we believe is her lover and she is telling him the importance of marriage.

One interpretation we made was that the palms and hands were a metaphor for the mother and father’s relationship. It is given the actions of repelling and also linking together. ‘They may have been repelled to separate hands’/ ‘but in me they touch where fingers link to palms’. To emphasise this, the poet refers to a children's game where the hands are put together with the index fingertips touching, knuckles of the other fingers touching, and the thumbs bent inwards. The index fingers, children are told, represents the steeple or tower of the church, the knuckles the body of the church and the folded thumbs the door. When turned over so the palms and fingers are exposed, representing the contents of the church. "Here is the church... here is the steeple... open the door... and here are all the people. ”  The third stanza shows us the opinions of family members and friends who witnessed the coming together of the parents. ‘but friends who quarry for their image by a river’. This shows us that the relative are searching and trying to remember the memories of  the good times they shared ( photos, videos); “nothing left of their togetherness but friends” – brings about the question of who’s side do the couple’s friends go on?

The poem is a poem is a Villanelle form which is very structured and has a strict rhyme scheme, 5 stanzas with 3 lines however the last stanza includes 4 lines. Stanza 1 to 5 is recognition of her parents’ marriage and the last stanza gives us different approach as she is speaking to her lover. ‘ I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms’.  Rhyming words like words such as ‘palms’, ‘hands’ and ‘demands’ which may at first seem shaky (making them half rhymes), however this helps to highlight that children are not carbon copies of their parents, a direct link to the title. But that there is always a link despite physical separation gives us different approach as she is speaking to her lover. ‘I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms’. The use of repetition is repeated at the beginning of the poem and also at the end: ‘My fathers in my hands, but my mothers in my palms.’ This shows us how close her and her parents her even though they are not together. 

Please Hold - blog post by Payal & Jess

‘Please Hold’

The literal meaning of ‘Please Hold’ is about a man who is losing his patience when he is on the phone as he finds himself continuously talking to a voice mail machine. He gets angrier by the minute yet his wife is explaining to him this is the way things are nowadays. I think that the in depth meaning of the poem is about the future and how it is expensive as everything revolves around technology and this male speaker happens to be old fashioned with his ways and has not accepted robots, machines and other sources of technology; therefore, I think this poem is a way of him expressing his worries and concerns about the future. He mimics the voice mail and all its ‘countless options’ but implies that with whatever answer you give it takes you to a ‘dead end’ this creates the idea of voice mails being like mazes, which shows that the speaker finds this new technology confusing.

The structure of this poem is very irregular. There are 2 stanzas of which contain different amounts of lines. The first stanza is much longer than the second it contains 50 lines whereas the final stanza contains only 3 lines. The long stanza could be to exaggerate how voice mails are long and never ending just like the stanza. It could also show how passionate the writer is about this topic. That he is so angry that he is continuously writing more and his hate for technology is never-ending.

The language used in ‘Please Hold’ is informal as though it’s spoken. For instance, ‘I’m talking to a robot’ suggests the speaker is explaining the event to the reader. However, the reader can understand it’s literally a mental rant. It’s more the tone that is significant as it’s sarcastic using dry humour, common to this Irish poet. This tone may be to emphasise how relatable the poem is and the point of this poem that the evolution of technology reduces humanity.

He uses a lot of repetition perhaps to mimic the voice mail as they often repeat themselves or also to show that he has heard these phrases numerous times and has now memorised them. He often repeats the saying, ‘my wife says, this is the future’; this could be to show that all he ever hears is his wife telling him this is the future now because technology is improving day by day and something new is invented everyday. He then compares the agent on the phone to a robot. Implying that even if they passed the phone through to a real person whatever they say will be scripted just like the robot. There is no real conversation and once again he thinks that ‘this is the future’.

One important feature of this poem is the repetition of the German phrase ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ (or ‘A Little Night Music’). It is a popular piece of classical music by Mozart commonly used as ‘holding music’ when one is put on hold. The phrase is used to refer back to the title and the main theme of the poem but also the repetition, and particularly the swearing that breaks the last use of the phrase, is created to accentuate the irritation of the speaker, written by the poet as though the reader is listening to the music themselves.

As the exam will require comparing two poems, it is important to discuss what poems can be linked with ‘Please Hold’. Clearly, one possible link is ‘The Fox in the National Museum of Wales’ as both centre around the approach of the  future. Another poem ‘Please Hold’ could be linked to is Barber’s ‘Material’ as both speakers dislike the loss of humanity and the destruction technology causes. However, both comparative poems lack the same structure as O’Driscoll’s ‘Please Hold’. On a smaller note, a poem one could compare this poem to, in terms of structure, is ‘Effects’ as both speakers express themselves in a conversational manner and both have a irregular pattern- the rhyming of ‘Effects’ and the repetition of ‘Please Hold’.   

The Deliverer - blog post by Ellie & Emily

The Deliverer by Tishani Doshi

The title ‘The Deliverer’ arises many different interpretations of what a deliverer could be associated with; some of the most prominent ideas being hospitals, babies and prophets. These first impressions help the reader formulate a prediction before reading the poem and in this case allow us to understand the poem whilst we are reading it. Tishani Doshi used ‘The Deliverer’ to share a story of a young girl’s adoption and the frequentness of this situation in her country. In some cultures a male baby is much more valued than the birth of a female due to the fact that it is important for a son to continue the family name; many baby girls were disregarded and left to die.

The poems structure is split into three parts with the use of asterisks in between stanzas, these act as a barrier or a divide between cultures; one being the characters old home and the other being her new adoptive home in America. This split between the two cultures presents the polar opposites of the two places. In addition to this the number of lines in each stanza is effected by the split, within the third section each stanza has exactly three lines for three stanzas where as the last section the number of lines in each stanza slowly recede. One interpretation of this could be that the number of lines represents the amount of joy being associated with the child; in the third section it begins with three stanzas to show the initial joy of the possibility of the new born being a boy but this declines after they ‘feel for penis or no penis,’, indicating that the joy has been lost as the baby was not male. Another interpretation is that majority of the action in the poem being a routine as the majority of the stanzas are organised into three lines but once again the pause at the line previously mentioned above implies some form of disruption.

Following the ideas of conflicting cultures above, there are clear differences within the sections with the use of verbs. The child was treated as an inanimate object in the first and last section with the use of detached verbs: ‘stuffed’ ‘ abandoned’ ‘toss’, by using these impersonal actions the reader is given the impression that the mothers described in the deliverer have been almost conditioned into having no attachment in regards to their own baby girls. This contrasts with the verbs used in the middle section: ‘seen or touched’ ‘crying’, these verbs come with more relation to emotions and sensitivity which is lacked in the surrounding sections. The almost juxtaposing verbs reinforce the barrier between the west culture and east.

Readers may interpret the voice of this poem to be an American child talking about their adoptive sister from the line ‘this is the one my mother will bring’ but it could alternatively be interpreted as the adopted child talking about herself in third person. This interpretation could explain the conflict of cultures being a key theme throughout the poem; as if she feels that she is no longer the child that was thrown away by her biological mother but also realising her loss of true heritage.

The Deliverer could be compared to ‘To my nine-year-old self’ as they both show a sense of disconnection with themselves or their past.