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How to revise for English Lit GCSE?

I don't know where to start with my revision. How should I revise for this effectively and also understand the books well?

I'm doing:
-An Inspector Calls
-A Christmas Carol (hate this book so much)
-Macbeth (I despise this book too)
-18 poems
-Unseen Poetry (don't know how to approach this?)

Can someone please explain in detail? Also For poetry how should I format my essays to get the best grades possible? Same with my other essays.

Reply 1

username4111606

Do you have revision guides?

Reply 2

AngelStarfire

Original post by Vivi2018

Do you have revision guides?

I have the revision guide for An Inspector Calls but I can borrow the revision guides for the other 2 books from the school library.

Reply 3

username4111606

Original post by AngelStarfire

I have the revision guide for An Inspector Calls but I can borrow the revision guides for the other 2 books from the school library.

That’s your best bet. You need to go through the guides and familiarise yourself with all the info.
Then start doing practice answers and asking your teacher to mark and give feedback

Reply 4

malfoymanor

For the poetry I made a table of themes against titles and marked which poem had which theme. It made it really easy to see which poems had similar themes so when it came to doing practice essays I could remember which one to use from that. I’d also stick to remembering only a few in detail, perhaps start with only remembering three key quotes from each poem so you can build from there.
As for the other books/play, I simply went through my notes and for each character, theme, symbol or literary device I marked the most useful quotes in terms of language/analysis and importance to that theme/character description. I did it one character/theme at a time and wrote them on a separate piece of paper with subtitles for what it represented. From this new list I tried to get the number of quotes for each section down to no more than 7 or 8 (as you would only need no more than this amount in an essay). When I put the quotes into flashcards, it looked like this:

*example for Macbeth, I didn’t study this for gcse so I only have limited year 8 knowledge sorry*

FRONT:

How is LADY MACBETH presented in Macbeth?
• manipulative
• sneaky?
• put points here of her characteristics
• preferably put them in chronological order (eg if she was kind at the start and then evil at the end, put it in that order and try to separate your bullet points into beginning, middle and end to make sure you cover a range of parts in the text)

BACK:

•bullet point a quote from LB or about LB, preferably with an important literary device e.g alliteration, emotive language or something typical of Shakespeare, and highlight it. In a different colour pen/fineliner, underline what you would analyse in the exam and annotate briefly what you could say.
•keep doing this, one for each quality you put on the front so you know how many are on the back when you try to remember the quote (however, if you had two quotes for a quality, I wrote x2 next to it so I knew, when I had to test myself, that I had to recall 2 quotes)

If you were doing a theme or symbol (do you have symbols in Macbeth? we did for lord of the flies) you could write ‘how is HATRED explored/presented in Macbeth’ or something similar. I tended to write the title of the flashcard similarly to how an essay title might be phrased so it would be easier for me to select the best quotes for the exam and remember ones that are more relevant for a possible question.

I hope this help, if not please ask 😂
Good luck!

Reply 5

Infinite Series

I found Mr Bruff's youtube channel to be helpful during my GCSE English revision. It's definitely worth checking out. He explains how to get top marks for all the questions as well. :smile: