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the main thing i did was do TONS of essays, trying my best to read grade 9 essays and see what kind of analysis was being written in there, and i'd give my teachers tons and tons of essays to mark and get their feedback - this was honestly the biggest thing for eng literature and i'd highly recommend this, if you can get your teachers (or even friends who get grade 9s) to look over your essays for you
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initially in those essays, i didn't give myself a time limit and focused on just getting the content for grade 9s (i understand time is limited, so maybe don't spend too long doing that) and then moved on to trying to condense that into a short a time as possible
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for the poems etc., don't even worry about learning everything for all of them - pick a couple to know in depth analysis on, and memorise important quotes for the others - you don't need to learn everything for every poem
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as well as that, my school gave frameworks for how to answer all these questions, e.g. sentence starters to show analysis etc, i'm not sure if your school has given you those, but if not i'd maybe ask my teachers
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for english language, we again had frameworks for how to answer pretty much every style of question - after that it is a matter of doing AS MUCH PRACTICE AS POSSIBLE - literally i would sit and practice doing qs and giving them to my teacher to mark until i was getting what i wanted
Reply 2
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the main thing i did was do TONS of essays, trying my best to read grade 9 essays and see what kind of analysis was being written in there, and i'd give my teachers tons and tons of essays to mark and get their feedback - this was honestly the biggest thing for eng literature and i'd highly recommend this, if you can get your teachers (or even friends who get grade 9s) to look over your essays for you
•
initially in those essays, i didn't give myself a time limit and focused on just getting the content for grade 9s (i understand time is limited, so maybe don't spend too long doing that) and then moved on to trying to condense that into a short a time as possible
•
for the poems etc., don't even worry about learning everything for all of them - pick a couple to know in depth analysis on, and memorise important quotes for the others - you don't need to learn everything for every poem
•
as well as that, my school gave frameworks for how to answer all these questions, e.g. sentence starters to show analysis etc, i'm not sure if your school has given you those, but if not i'd maybe ask my teachers
•
for english language, we again had frameworks for how to answer pretty much every style of question - after that it is a matter of doing AS MUCH PRACTICE AS POSSIBLE - literally i would sit and practice doing qs and giving them to my teacher to mark until i was getting what i wanted
Reply 5
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rinse mr salles videos of grade 9/ 30/30 essays and make notes at the same time on a document, writing down key points like context and quote analysis that i didn't think of initially, sometimes i'd put the video in 1.5x speed too
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in these videos he also showed which parts of the essay got L3 AO3 and stuff like that so i would make sure to highlight/bold this on my document
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i used the same document for every essay i watched since i wanted to basically just collect a massive amount of analysis and context that i could use
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i emailed my english teacher to read an example paragraph i wrote and give me feedback, and i repeated this process a few times while taking on the feedback she gave
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one important thing that i remember distinguishes a grade 9 from a 8 is a thesis statement at the start which just introduces the question and what themes you're going to link it to? i dont remember too well but i think mr salles talks about this in his videos
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i planned a few example essays and one of the questions i planned for was similar to the real thing
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also, this is quite important - go through all past papers from previous years and see what characters/themes they have already asked and note them down, just so you can see what might be more or less likely to come up
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dont focus on more than 3/4 poems, you don't need to analyse all of them in depth
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the ones you do analyse should be ones that can be applicable to many other poems - to work this out just briefly analyse each poem to see what the overarching theme is and write it down, then group ones of similar themes together e.g. ozymandias was one that i learnt in depth since you could apply it to many other poems
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try to think of different interpretations to get extra marks, i didn't have any original ones but again i used mr salles' videos on poetry anthology because he went into depth and gave various alternative interpretations and quote analysis
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for the unseen poetry it's definitely a bit more difficult since you can't just learn a bunch of stuff, but i'd say just try to practise a few before the exam and use the knowledge you collected from watching the essay analysis videos to help you think of different ways to interpret the poem?
Reply 7
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