SQA Higher English Section Two

for close reading i find having a wide vocabulary is honestly so helpful, especially for own words or word choice questions. I read a lot so I've slowly made my vocab pretty big but if its something you struggle with my teacher always recommends to read (good quality) news articles. Like the guardian, the observer etc, not the sun or the daily mail lol. I think knowing the "formulas" for how to answer the types of questions is really helpful- my teacher gives us sheets saying the formula, basically a step by step of how to answer all word choice questions, or all imagery ones, etc. If you don't have set steps to doing them I find looking at past papers and comparing the question to the answer in the mark scheme is really good. It really helps you see what exactly the sqa is looking for and it can help you be a lot more concise in your answer if you know they're really only looking for a specific phrase or two.
for close reading- I think I saw on some other threads that you're doing carol ann duffy poems? (might be wrong haha) I've not done those so cant give much specific help on that but there's some general stuff that helps with the poetry questions. i like making a table of all the commonalities between the poems. i.e. for norman maccaig poems, ill write a little summary for each poem on how relationships are important to it, or how the theme of loss etc, make sure to include some quotes so that it helps you tie the quotes to specific themes. obviously not all poems will fit all themes but its good to try and stretch what you can write as much as possible. even if a poem doesn't obviously fit a theme is there any possible way you could waffle a little and stretch your explanation? just incase you find yourself short on answers. when it comes to annotating poems I find colour coding based on theme really helps me remember quotes/themes/links between poems. like if its a quote that helps with the characterisation of someone in the poem I always highlight it grey so that way the words are almost colour coded to specific topics in my head? if that makes sense? like if the 10 marker mentions a character who ___blablabla__ then I know, oh even though I need stuff from two or more different poems I just need to try and remember my grey quotes. again, i'd treat this really similar to close reading in that I recommend looking at past mark schemes.
for the essay it really depends what genre you're doing your essay on, I did poetry for my essay at nat 5 but this year I'm doing prose fiction. I wouldn't even know where to start for writing an essay on a drama text or a movie/tv show. what I'm doing for my essay is to try and write a bunch of practice essays. At nat 5 you could kinda get away with "memorising" two or three essays and you'd likely have an applicable question show up, but at higher the questions are so randomly specific that you'd be testing fate with that. i took a look through all the previous (prose fiction) questions from 2016 until 2023, including the 2023 specimen paper, and I kinda made a tally of questions that are similar enough to each other that I could practice one essay and just modify it slightly in the exam depending on how the question shows up. i.e. there's almost always a setting question it might just ask about the setting slightly differently but spending the time to get at least the basics of a setting essay written saves a lot of thinking time in the exam. i think with the essay it also helps to know that a lot of the questions (at least for prose fiction) are really just theme questions kinda disguised as other questions so it gets pretty easy to go off on a tangent about something they're not interested in. it is pretty annoying that there is almost no way to practice and self mark an essay as the marking seems incredibly subjective so if possible id see if you could have your teacher mark your practice essays and give feedback, i.e. something my teacher told me on an essay I did last month and got 19/20 on is that having a good structure to it can really help with marks. like if you're talking about a couple events that happen throughout it, they much prefer if you talk about the events in chronological order, especially if one event leads to another
I hope this helps, I kinda didn't realise how much I had written until just now but I can try and clarify or answer anything else

I don't know if other people are doing Higher English think it's a bit cruel from the SQA that we only get one hour and thirty minutes for a set text and critical essay. In National 5 this time limit was acceptable, I don't understand how it's the same for Higher. I am really stressing out on how to complete my set text and critical essay during this short amount of time. Can anyone give any advice to gain an A in Higher English?