English Spoken Language CA - Notes?!

We received our CA question on Monday for the actual CA this coming Monday. I decided to spend every day working on it, writing the entire essay so that I can perfect it and then study it. I'm really happy with how it's looking, but how can I make some good notes to help jog my memory while I am doing the assessment?

The exam board is AQA, according to their website we are only allowed to use 150 words in our candidate notes. That is NOT a lot guys!

Any advice on how to make notes / annotations that will truly help?

Thanks in advance.

Huh that's wierd.. I dont think there was a word limit when I did my CA's.

What is it that you have to do?




I think they're talking about the plan, not the actual assessment

@Carrot_Cake_13 @trabajadora


The CA question is:

Explore the ways in which the participants use spoken language in the context of a live television debate in order to achieve their aims.How do social influences and expectations impact on their success in achieving those aims.

On the AQA website it says that the 150 word limit for the notes came into effect in 2014, not sure what it was before! My tutor just said 'one page of A4' without specifying how many words it could be. We are also allowed to take in a 'lightly annotated' transcript.

The actual essay is 800-1000 words.

When I was doing GCSEs my English teacher said quotes aren't counted in the number of words, so don't worry about using too many of them if you are

I would say try and study the essay as much as you can. This will mean that it's fresh in your memory and then you won't have to rely on the plan so much. Also, try to shorten your notes down as much as you can (the more you revise the shorter they'll be). For example, if you wanted to focus your first paragraph on how one of the participants it talking, shorten ''Participant one says *insert word here* to assert their authority in the debate'' to ''Participant *insert word here* dominance''. It doesn't matter if your plan makes 0 sense to everyone except you, no one else reads it so it doesn't matter if you just have a page full of random words Acronyms might also help too. In my example before you could make it even shorter to ''P1 *W* D''.

If you feel like you do have to go over the word count a little bit, don't worry about it. The examiners don't count (unless it looks like there's an excessive amount) and you're not going to get disqualified if you're 5-10 words over.

Good luck!