How can I make my analysis more sophisticated to achieve a higher grade?

Naturally, the answer to this question will depend on your current work - to provide a comprehensive answer I would need to have a look at what kind of things you already do well in your writing, and where you might be going wrong. That being said, there are some areas that every student can work on to improve their textual analysis. Firstly, a sophisticated essay will not only tell the examiner about the text, but will tell them exactly what you thought of the author's work - as an individual. This doesn't necessarily mean you need to interpret the text in a very unusual way, just that you need to make what your opinion of the author's work was and whether there is anything you can draw from your own reaction. For example, I might talk about how the text used the colour red is used as a symbol in the text (texual analysis), and how I think that this may signify passion or anger (individualistic viewpoint). To take this analysis a step further, we can ask ourselves the question - is our analysis a product of our own society or time? Do we only associate red with passion because of a recent societal events, or is it a view common across different literary eras? Might a reader from a different era interpret this symbol in a different way? By answering these questions, your answer will tackle entirely different viewpoints and certainly impress the examiner. Furthermore, many students often analyse texts using linguistic terms yet don't explain why the author's use of these terms is significant. If the author has included such a literary feature, it is highly likely that they intended it to be there, and one of the greatest skills necessary to succeed in English Literature is being able to work out why! We can do this by reflecting on what sort of effects a feature might generally produce, for example - a question mark may simply show that a statement is interrogatory, but it may also be used to make a statement rhetorical - a type of question that is not interrogatory as it requires no answer, but rather serves to highlight a point. For example, the sentence "What did you do today?" might be an interrogatory question, but could also be rhetorical if it was said in an ironic way. Therefore, it is important to consider the possible intentions of an author in including certain literary techniques in their work, and doing so will improve your grade.