Everything in English is Intentional

English is essentially a subject that requires, more than anything, the expression of meaning in texts. Something that might not have been explicitly explained to you is what is actually meant by “meaning”. Although it is quite abstract, and can be treated as a sort of umbrella term for the bigger picture in English, we can pinpoint some aspects of meaning that remain constant.

Meaning can generally be interpreted as the emotions that a text evokes, as well as the moral of a story or simply the message the text is trying to project. When you write essays that focuses on meaning, you must showcase your understanding of the text’s moral, and any emotions it gives rise to. This is when it’s handy to keep in mind that everything that you see or read in English is intentional.

Intelligent HSC® Exam preparation requires you to adapt different mindsets depending on the HSC® Exam subject you are taking. You may have seen the popular internet meme of “what the author meant vs what my English teacher interprets”, where there is a sentence like “she stared at the blue wall”, which your English teacher interprets as some kind of symbolism for sadness, which is mocked for its apparent ridiculousness. Certainly, if you are taking a science subject, you are required to only infer what is supported by strong evidence, however when it comes to HSC® Exam English, things are a little difference. When it comes to HSC® Exam English, you should aim to adopt the English teacher mentality that internet memes love to mock. So when you discuss a narrative that is seemingly trivial and meaningless, like “she stared at the blue wall”, you must keep in mind that every detail in English in intentional. If the author did not want you, the reader, to know that the wall was blue, they wouldn’t have made it explicitly known. They could have as easily written that she stared at a red, green, or purple wall, but blue is something we intrinsically associate with sadness. So to say that the blue colour of a wall symbolises sadness is not as ridiculous as internet memes make it out to be.

When you are asked to analyse something like this, and are asked to provide evidence of a character’s sadness, you are more likely to notice the blue colour of the wall and can use this in answering the question. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that when reading a sentence such as “she stared at the blue wall”, in any other circumstance would not inspire any deep analytic insight in the reader, but in your study of HSC® Exam English, this seemingly meaningless detail is the basis for your analysis and justification. Everything you read in an HSC® Exam English assignment should be seen as intentional and serve as the foundation for expressing and extrapolating meaning in order to sustain a sophisticated, justified response.