A-Level Literature

Make notes on characters, themes, language devices , annotate the whole novel or play or poem, read critical commentary and highlight interesting points you can put in your essays, get your teachers to mark and remark your essays. As for structure PEEE, Point,Evidence,Explain,Exploit .The big marks are in the final E . Any ideas or point that pop into your head write them down, original ideas are gold in essays.

I'm in the same situation!

For CW I make sure I get near 100% or near enough 100%, and that's just by knowing the AO's eg for this year we have to focus on A03 and A04, so critics and context for the majority of the marks.
For my CW I have structured each paragraph around iether a critic, context or both.
My teacher made us write an essay on each text we had studied before we compared them in the cw.
This really helped as when it comes to writing the CW I'll just edit out stuff from each of the essays and put them into the final piece.
It also helps if you read articles written by critics on your text, as you will get a good feel for academic writing that you can develop in your CW.

For the exams I do A LOT of times essays, get the teacher to mark them and improve. That's basically my revision.
This way I feel that I have learnt the quotes and critical theories.
I do a lot of questions surrounding themes/characters etc basically anything that could pop up.
Also I use quotations and critical theories that are versatile and can be used to answer many questions.
You don't have to just learn theories remember, you can improvise and say 'a feminist approach' or 'a psychoanalytical approach would be that...' you will still get marks!

Finally learn to pace yourself. Take time with your essays, and you'll see that you get quicker at writing them.

Hope this all helps.

I'm in the same boat as you, so what's your approach to grabbing that A?

Thank you! I tend to read the book over and over and make notes in recurring themes, characters, use the context and just write a lot of essays, but A-Level english is definitely very tough..

That's good because then quotes tend to stick more.
It is, the grade boundaries are quite high I think!

Yes! And it is so difficult to grasp exactly what they want. I thoroughly enjoy the material but am exasperated every time I need to write essays on it because I always seem to miss some point which shouldn't even matter.

I think that the most important things are explaining really well the material and ATTENTION TO DETAILS! Thinking Metaphorically I think must also be really important..