Jane Eyre - Illustrating and Supporting Points

This high school English Literature quiz sees how good you are at illustrating and supporting points in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Writing a good essay about literature depends very much on how well you can use evidence from the text. Making a point without backing it up with a quotation or example from the text is not very persuasive, and essays should always aim to persuade. Using evidence also demonstrates how carefully you read and how well you understand what you have read. When you refer specifically and accurately to evidence from a text, your writing becomes much more effective. This essential skill definitely requires practice; it does not necessarily come easily. In addition to the ability to select appropriate evidence, this skill also depends upon attention to details such as punctuation in order to get things right.

This quiz is designed to test the vital literary skills involved in quoting evidence from a text in support of a point. Challenge yourself to identify the answers which have incorporated evidence accurately. In your own essays, always remember to follow up your quotation with an explanation, too!

How to use evidence to support a point:

There are three key methods of using evidence from a text: paraphrasing, quoting single words or short phrases, and quoting longer sections of text. You should aim to practice each of these methods. Paraphrasing is one of the easiest of these, but is often overlooked as a skill to practice. Try to master the art of paraphrasing because it is an essential aspect of good writing. When you use your own words in order to paraphrase a section of text, you clearly demonstrate your knowledge. This skill is also very useful in exam situations where you do not have the text to hand.

The second method is to quote individual words or short phrases from the text in support the point you wish to make. If you have memorized short, relevant quotes from the text, you can use them in this way to answer an exam question. Whenever you wish to discuss language choice or minor details in the text, this is the best method to use. Writing essays which use quotes from texts takes practice and, as you improve, you might like to consider combining methods. For example, mixing paraphrase with short quotations in the same sentence is a flexible and effective technique to use. Practicing such a combination of methods will help you to avoid writing awkwardly long sentences crammed full of multiple short quotations.

The final method of using evidence is to quote a full sentence or more. Sometimes a short phrase does not make sense on its own or it seems too difficult to incorporate a short quote grammatically. When this is the case, this is the method to use. Quoting full sentences is also appropriate when you plan to discuss a longer quotation in detail.

A useful tip: avoid quoting single, ordinary words just because they are used in the text. For single words, quotation marks should only be used if the word itself is significant. A single ordinary word should only be placed inside quotation marks if there is something significant about its use. For example, the word “wife” is ordinary and you would not normally quote it as evidence; Rochester, however, uses the word with bitter emphasis, and in this case the word is not being used in an ordinary way. If quoting Rochester's use of the word "wife", you would want to use quotation marks. Otherwise, you must always use quotation marks whenever you use an exact phrase or sentence from the text.

Try this quiz on the best way to use evidence from Jane Eyre. The aim of this quiz is to test your ability to quote and to paraphrase; your knowledge of the text is not being tested here. One helpful tip is that it might be easier to eliminate the incorrect answers first!