Higher Critical Essay Tips

Let's just say I can't, for the life of me, write critical essays in timed conditions at all. Give me a few hours and I'm fine, but in an exam it takes me an hour to write 1 paragraph. In nat 5 I basically re-wrote an essay (not initially written in timed conditions) I had partially memorised because the question was so similar, and that's probably the only reason I managed to scrape an A.

Higher is a fair bit harder than that. I'm predicted a C, which tbh I think is an.... optimistic prediction.

My teacher is not the most helpful. Her advice to me was "practice writing essays in timed conditions" which isn't particularly useful when you don't even know where to start.

wat do?

oh and I'm doing the godfather (film) for my essay

You got to pick the Godfather??? This is for English I'm guessing, right? What I'm studying may be a bit different from what you are studying, but I think these tips still apply!

Have you asked your teacher if you can use one of the school's laptops to write your English essay? You don't even actually need to have extra time as it turns out, only for your writing to be extremely slow or illegible when writing under short periods of time.

If you want to learn how to properly structure your essay, you need to have proper knowledge of the media source. I would advise you to watch The Godfather again or read the book depending on which you are studying. Make sure you have a proper bank of quotes, scene evaluations and character evaluations. This will really help you to create anything worthwhile, even if you have no idea how to structure the essay. Then, I would advise you to go on the SQA website and attempt any past paper. Complete it under timed conditions. This will show you how prepared you are. Read over your essay, and then take a red pen or any other colour pen, and add any enhanced vocabulary or points. This will show you what you could have done better. I will also tell you not to watch the movie because you have to but watch it for enjoyment. If you appreciate the movie, you will find it easier in the exam to bring up key information.

In the end, you should just relax because if you organise your materials, you will do well in the exam.

It was my teacher who chose the film, not me.

It's not my writing speed that's the problem, I can physically write fast enough. I just get stuck on the whole "what to write" thing. I have ideas in my head on what to write, but I just can't put them together on the page to form coherent sentences/paragraphs. Like, I just can't find the words to say things. It's really frustrating since I know I am capable of doing it. I never had this problem when I was writing essays in history. It also doesn't help that I just kinda forget what happens in the movie after I've watched it. At this point, I don't really think I have enough time to rewatch the movie and memorise what happens in it.

I'm also doing higher english and I understand what you mean by not knowing what to write and it is frustrating. You don't have to completely memorise absolutely everything that happens, as you don't re-tell the story in the essay. Make sure you are able to think of quotes (my teacher said that 15 is enough, but they don't have to be long) and link it to the main themes in the film and the question. To help you revise, before you do an essay you should write topic sentences (the sentence at the start of each paragraph that introduces the topic) and this helps to break it up a bit as you will know what to write for each paragraph. When doing each paragraph I think to myself: topic sentence, quote, connotations, relate to question, theme. Hope this helps