Ask a class to name a technique in An Inspector Calls and dramatic irony will come up within seconds. It is an ideal example of a device students know the name of and cannot yet use. Their essays are full of sentences that mention it and explain nothing.

The play is built on it. Mr. Birling's remarks about war and the Titanic sound confident to the characters and foolish to an audience who knows what came next. That gap between what the characters know and what the audience knows is the source of the play's early humor and its later force.

The feedback challenge is to move students from naming the device to explaining what it does to an audience and to the play's message.

Here is a way to approach it.

The three-step explanation

A useful model asks students to write three linked sentences. First, what the character says or does. Second, what the audience knows that the character does not. Third, what that gap makes the audience think about the character or the idea. The pattern is simple enough to memorize and flexible enough to use with any example.

• Quote the character's confident statement accurately
• State what the 1945 audience knows about the events he mentions
• Explain the effect on how we see the character
• Link the effect to Priestley's wider message about responsibility
• Avoid using the term without an example attached

Beyond the obvious example

The Titanic line gets used in nearly every essay. Encourage students to look for other examples, such as the family's certainty at the start that nothing can touch them, or the way Mrs. Birling assures the Inspector she has done nothing wrong. These lines gain force because the audience is already ahead of the characters.

Rewarding students who find less familiar examples raises the standard across the class and makes marking more interesting.

Feedback wording that works

"What does the audience know here that the character does not?" is a short comment that prompts a longer response. Another good one is "How does this change how we see him?" Both push the student to write about effect.

If a student uses the term correctly but only once, ask them to apply it to a second moment later in the play. The exercise builds range as well as accuracy.

Spotting the pattern across a class

Because dramatic irony appears in so many essays, the same comments get written repeatedly. A rubric-based tool such as GraideMind can identify where the device is named without explanation and draft a prompt asking for the missing effect, which you can refine before returning the work.

That leaves you time to focus on the students who are ready to explore subtler uses of irony.