Full marks in English literature GCSE (130/130) AMA

Favourite type of cheese?

Hi! I went from a low 7 in mocks to full marks in GCSE. I’m definitely not super gifted at English so I had to learn a few good techniques to use in exams and I also had to work A LOT. If you have ADHD/time management issues and you haven’t gotten diagnosed in time for GCSEs then I could also help w that.
I did Romeo and Juliet, Love and relationships poetry and Lord of the Flies. Feel free to ask how to structure a good answer and general top tips as I spent hours and hours searching the internet so I could condense all I found if necessary.

Hello I am in year 10 so I just started preparing for my GCSEs. I am doing lord of the flies too. What are your top tips for the lord of the flies section? And what were the questions like for the lord of the flies section? Thank you

I recommend really honing in on the context in this book, golding wrote a lot of news articles and i think a biography, he really explores his opinions and thoughts on evil, mankind and religion, all of which are core themes to Lotf. After that try and get context for social tensions in that time, the James Bulger murder was a huge incident that catapulted ideas that society was not functioning as it should be and that social reform focussing on the proper upbringing of children was necessary.

As for the actual analysis of the book itself, I recommend analysing the symbolism of even the smallest events. Golding uses really smart word choice and literary focalism to flesh out his characters and make it clear to the reader really who this character is. To understand this, I recommend reading and analysing the differences between the way Jack and Simon perceive nature. When Simon is the focus, he sees beauty. For example, at the end of one of the earlier chapters, he’s slipped away from the crowd and the atmosphere changes smoothly into calmness and focusses on rich language and long form sentences and clever use of sibilance to actually form this atmosphere. Whereas with Jack he sees Nature as something to kill and abuse, use his first encounter with the pig as help for quotes for this. There’s also a direct comparison between Jack and Simon when they talk about candle buds in the first or second chapter, Simin says they look like candles ( you could say that it is an allusion to candles in a church) but Jack simply concludes that he cannot eat it. This is a direct comparison on how they treat and respect life.

note important symbols such as clothing, pigs, huts, glasses, the conch and even the way the characters change during the book. Analyse the symbolism of each major event for these symbols, for example what is Golding trying to say by having Jack steal the glasses in the way they did. Why do you think Piggy was the character to wear glasses? What does Ralph symbolise on the island? What does this have to do with his political failure? What does his political failure at the near end of the book say about his ‘voters’ or the littluns? Why did the conch break at the same time Piggy died?

For quote banks, I recommend making multiple quote banks for each character, each relating to a different theme or to another character on the island. This is because more than often the questions ask about character and its best to bring about surrounding themes bc its impressive and shows analytical maturity. Also in the old spec, after they were done asking about individual characters, they started asking about 2 characters and how they interacted.

for structure, I chose to do 3 or 4 paragraphs for the body but you really have to bring up a lot of quotes, they don’t have to be long but short words to embed in your analysis is perfect, it shows that you know the book extremely well, and there AO1 marks specifically for that. For each paragraph, I always gave one point and supported with a main analysis and then gave two supporting pieces of analysis. For example, in the book, Roger is shown as a heartless, immoral character because he objectifies characters seeing Piggy as a ‘bag of fat’ and ralph as a ‘shock of yellow hair’… (After further analysis of that)
this is further supported by the early description of Roger that foreshadow his ‘dark’ nature…(This isn’t that great but you get what I mean when I say ‘supporting’ points)

It also may sound useless but try putting a little bit of context in the introduction, it settles the examiner into your essay and sets their expectation that you know your context. It doesn’t have to be a lot but the date the book was written it and a ‘ Golding explores this theme through the perspective of a man who believed in the original sin and that humans are attracted to evil as ‘bees to honey’’, tailoring the pieces of context you mention to the question they ask obviously.

Hi! I went from a low 7 in mocks to full marks in GCSE. I’m definitely not super gifted at English so I had to learn a few good techniques to use in exams and I also had to work A LOT. If you have ADHD/time management issues and you haven’t gotten diagnosed in time for GCSEs then I could also help w that.
I did Romeo and Juliet, Love and relationships poetry and Lord of the Flies. Feel free to ask how to structure a good answer and general top tips as I spent hours and hours searching the internet so I could condense all I found if necessary.