How do you structure an answer to the source question on a HAT paper?

First of all, it will depend on the style of source, since every source has slightly different content, context, and intended meaning. Let's take for example last year's HAT paper, which was a constitutional document, The Code Noir, delineating articles issued by the French King to the their colonial officials in the Caribbean. These articles were demonstrating French policy in terms of the way slaves were permitted to carry out their lives and also the way in which slaves were treated. Now, the way I typically treat such a source is to use a method unusually named GRIPS, an acronym for Geography, Religion, Ideology, Politics, Society. Although these are not exhaustive categories for analysing a source - far from it - they provide a very good base from which to work and come up with further ideas as you begin to analyse the source. So, for example we might look at the geography of the source - it is clearly in the Caribbean and so an island. These slaves will have been subject to sea transport in order to arrive on the island and so we can extrapolate slightly and assume that the French were a wealthy nation. Further, we can try to see if there is a common ideology running through the sources, i.e. are slaves represented in a particular, consistent way and are they presented symbolically? Finally, we might use a political approach and look at the information given to us that it was issued by the King - therefore we know France was a monarchy and then make suggestions as to what the implications of this could have been. Ultimately, GRIPS stimulates further thought and allows you to start thinking about the source in a critical manner. This initial analysis is followed by quite a simple method which always leads to a more developed answer. These questions will usually ask you 'what can this source tell us about x' (in this case it might be French imperial practice) - and although it is useful to take GRIPS and apply it in terms of how useful the source is, we can also ask what does the source NOT tell us. For example, it doesn't tell us anything from the perspective of the slaves, and so our understand is from the top-down and not the bottom-up. Although this might seem obvious, there are always other contextual aspects which are not revealed in the source. Another point would be that would have no idea as to whether these articles were acted upon and enforced, and so we cannot build a full picture as to the execution of French imperial policy.