English lit alevel revision

Any tips or methods of how to revise?

idk what exam board you do (I did edexcel). for paper 1, its ok if you dont have a massive bank of critical quotes that can be applied to a specific question. if you can, try to find a few versatile ones that can fit a range of questions/themes or CAN be fit to a range of themes. similarly you dont need to know tons of context as in reality you'll probably mention it very briefly. just make sure you know about gender roles at the time, views on religion, what was going on at the time (+ any major historical events), why the play might have been written so that you can use that to back up your argument if you need to.

for poetry, when you compare poems, remember you can compare AND contrast. if there aren't many similarities, focus on the differences and maybe you might find some similarities eventually as well. before you go into the exam make sure you have a rough idea of the main themes (1 or 2 doesnt have to be a lot) running thru each poem so when you decide which question to do you have a starting point and dont waste too much time trying to remember what themes are discussed in each poem.

a good way to revise is look at past paper questions and the mark schemes so you can see what kind of ideas have been brought up in the past that maybe you didnt have. if your teachers have made predictions on whats going to come up make sure you've made short bullet point plans (with quotes from the text) to familiarise yourself with it. even if it doesn't come up, you might use some of those points somewhere else.

hope that helps xx