Source Analysis
HSC Part 1 – Question 3
O
Origin – Who? Where? When?
M
Motive – Why have they said this? What potential bias might exist?
C
Content – What have they said? Does this stack up to what you know of events? Can you
detect Bias in the language?
L
Limitation – What are the limits of this source? What does it not tell us? What is it limited
to giving us evidence for?
A
Audience – To whom was it sent? How might this impact what is said?
P
Perspective – What point of view might this person be coming from? Are they a learned
secondary scholar with years of research behind them writing 200 years after the events with
little bias – or a soldier on the front line with little knowledge and much bias due to the pain
they are suffering?
R
Reliability – Is this a reliable piece of information about the events it portrays? Why or why
not?
U
Usefulness – What is this source useful for?
(Remember all sources are useful for something)
Most HSC questions will only ask you to consider the last three but thinking through the first five
will help you to better consider perspective, reliability and usefulness. So don’t feel the need to
specifically mention the first 5.
When you answer source analysis question, you should spend 50% analysing the source and thinking
it through, this should all be in one paragraph and should come to a clear conclusion about the
reliability of the source. The second 50% should be spent on usefulness.
If you can conclude that the source in reliable then you can work out a lot of the usefulness by the
content of the source. If the source has questionable reliability then you will need to think more
broadly about usefulness.