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english lit and lang !

hi i’m in yr 11 and i got an 8 in english lang and 5 in english lit. I really want to improve lit and i want to keep my grade, if not improve it in lang.

my exam board is edexcel and our tests are lord of the flies, macbeth, jekyll and hyde and the belonging poetry collection.

In our mocks we got tested on unseen poetry, macbeth part an and jekyll and hyde part a + b. And for lang we got a full paper 2. I did better on the transactional writing - 33/40 but not so well on the non- fiction test.

I really struggle with time and analysis and often my handwriting as well. I don’t know really how to improve because 1/2 does not feel enough and i never end up finishing my essays.

I really need help , can anyone give any advice?

Reply 1

einaism

Original post

by limons_2

hi i’m in yr 11 and i got an 8 in english lang and 5 in english lit. I really want to improve lit and i want to keep my grade, if not improve it in lang.
my exam board is edexcel and our tests are lord of the flies, macbeth, jekyll and hyde and the belonging poetry collection.
In our mocks we got tested on unseen poetry, macbeth part an and jekyll and hyde part a + b. And for lang we got a full paper 2. I did better on the transactional writing - 33/40 but not so well on the non- fiction test.
I really struggle with time and analysis and often my handwriting as well. I don’t know really how to improve because 1/2 does not feel enough and i never end up finishing my essays.
I really need help , can anyone give any advice?

hey, im in y12 rn and i got 9s in lit and lang. i also struggled with time and the biggest thing that helped me was preplanning essays for popular questions, nothing in depth at all but just plan a topic for each paragraph and a few quotes to go with it. this means you dont waste a lot of time thinking about what to write and you can just get start writing straight away. for example our exam text was 'of mice and men' (i did igcse) and a popular question was the topic of authority / responsibility, so an essay plan i would have memorised would look something like this:

paragraph 1: george's authority over lennie

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'give it to me, lennie'

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'lennie, once more, obeyed him'

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'huge man' vs 'small and quick'

paragraph 2: slim's authority over the ranchworkers

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'prince of the ranch'

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‘his word was taken on any subject, be it politics or love’

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'his opinions were law'

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'you hadda, george. i swear you hadda'

paragraph 3: battle for authority between crooks and curley's wife

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‘they left all the weak ones here’

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'a dum dum and a lousy old sheep'

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'‘I could get you strung up on a tree so fast it ain't even funny’

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'candy was the master of the situation'

doing this also helps with memorising quotes bc you attach them to specific questions / topics. i did the same for poems that made sense to compare and i prepared like 3 points of comparison for each popular pairing. as for struggling with analysis on the spot, its always easier to pick out techniques first, semantic field is probably the easiest to start with and then go from there. hope that helps a little!