English Literature

How do I revise English Lit? I have tried practice essays but I don’t feel as if I’m getting better at technique. What do I do???

Reply 1

Kallisto

Entertainment Forum Helper

22

Original post by hats879

How do I revise English Lit? I have tried practice essays but I don’t feel as if I’m getting better at technique. What do I do???

Have you tried to watch summaries on youtube to the different books and authors? despite this, I would recommend you to read the boooks for an own opinion. Summaries are a good addition to reduce the plots and characters to the essential meanings.

Reply 2

jklaww

11

Are you GCSE or A-level and what’s your exam board? What specific things are you struggling with revising or is it mainly essay technique?
Ask your teacher/s if they would mark or even just have a quick look through your practice essays and give you some feedback so you know exactly what you need to work on.

(edited 5 months ago)

Reply 3

jklaww

11

For revising quotes, Quizlet is very helpful - there’s probably lots of flashcards for your texts already, but if you want to make your own, I found it helpful to do the question as the quote and the answer as context (just a few words about the situation) who or what the quote is about, who said it (if applicable), and themes it relates to. This made it much easier to quickly figure out what quotes I wanted to use after identifying the theme or the character the question was asking about.

(edited 5 months ago)

Reply 4

hats879

OP

9

GCSE AQA. I’m mostly struggling with exam techniques and making links. Thank you!

Reply 5

jklaww

11

Original post by hats879

GCSE AQA. I’m mostly struggling with exam techniques and making links. Thank you!

I did the same board - what texts are you doing?
I would say the most important thing with making links is making sure your essay logically flows, has a brief conclusion at the end of the essay that ties all your ideas together, as well as regularly referring back to the question in your essay.
For example, if you were writing about how evil is presented in a text, start off your paragraph with “xyz shows how evil is presented as abc because [1 or 2 reasons that you will back up with quotes in the paragraph]” and follow up each quote analysis/end of the paragraph with something along the lines of “… suggesting that xyz represents evil as abc because [brief summary of the point/s you made]”.

(edited 5 months ago)

Reply 6

hats879

OP

9

Original post by jklaww

I did the same board - what texts are you doing?
I would say the most important thing with making links is making sure your essay logically flows, has a brief conclusion at the end of the essay that ties all your ideas together, as well as regularly referring back to the question in your essay.
For example, if you were writing about how evil is presented in a text, start off your paragraph with “xyz shows how evil is presented as abc because [1 or 2 reasons that you will back up with quotes in the paragraph]” and follow up each quote analysis/end of the paragraph with something along the lines of “… suggesting that xyz represents evil as abc because [brief summary of the point/s you made]”.

Romeo and Juliet
A Christmas Carol
DNA
And power and conflict poetry
Thank you for the advice!

Reply 7

jklaww

11

Original post by hats879

Romeo and Juliet
A Christmas Carol
DNA
And power and conflict poetry
Thank you for the advice!

Ah none of my texts were the same unfortunately. One thing I would recommend for Shakespeare to get top grades is learn a few bits of context you could use for a lot of different questions and try to get it in your essay. (we did Macbeth which is verrrrry different to Romeo and Juliet so I can’t give good tips on what specifically you could include).
One that crops up a lot in Shakespeare that you could probably link to R&J across different questions is the idea of the Great Chain of Being (basically everything has a natural order with God at the top and then royalty and so on even going down to things like insects; Shakespeare often portrays characters as disrupting the Great Chain.)

Reply 8

Vijm

1

Hi , can anyone post the good YouTube channel for GCSE English

English Literature

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