GCSE English Language Week 4 Exam Preparation Tips

How to write a comparative essay

Hello everyone! Welcome back to week 4 of my GCSE English Language blog. I’m sure that the exam feels like it’s just around the corner now, so I hope everyone’s revision is going well. As promised last week, today I’m going to be giving you all my advice on writing comparative essays. You’ve had some time to digest my pointers on approaching comparison – now let’s think about what the end product is going to look like. I’m going to be talking specifically about comparative essays because they involve the same skills as essays on a single extract, only with a few extra steps that are often the source of confusion, but a lot of this advice applies to any kind of essay you may write in either GCSE English language paper.

There are two comparison questions in English language paper two: the first is a short summary question (only 12 marks) and the other is a longer comparative analysis (16 marks) which should include more depth and detail in your response.

Where to start

Indulge me for a second as I repeat a few of the points I made last week. As I explained in that post, you want to try and talk about perspective and theme and language devices if you can: all 3 are essential to hit the higher marks. Use these as a basis for your answer, think about the quotes you can talk about that will allow you to compare the texts in all 3 ways. Once you have picked these quotes (2-3 for the summary question, 3-4 for the longer analysis), you can start putting together the structure of your essay. I found it easiest to structure my essays if the quotes I had picked discussed a similar theme but had slight differences in the method or perspective through which they presented them.

Essay structure

As usual, I’m not here to tell you what to do. Some of you probably have essay structures that work well for you, and that’s great. In that case, ignore this section! No need to change something that isn’t broken. However, for those of you that might be struggling, this is how I approach a comparative essay. Try it out and see if it works for you.

Firstly, I always used the PEE structure that most students are taught a variation of - PEEL, PEA etc., they all basically mean the same thing. The acronym ‘point, evidence, explain’ ensures that you have a well-developed argument and forces you to stay focused, which is something I like. You can use this structure for comparison, too, but it will need a bit of tweaking.

I would always merge two PEE paragraphs together: one on each source. This way, you’re still giving a developed analysis of each source, but by merging the paragraphs together by theme, you’re also making sure you’re getting those comparison marks. My advice would be to provide a sentence or two to link your discussion of Source A to the discussion of Source B, to ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of simply talking about the two texts separately.

Tips to stay focused

One of the biggest problems we find with comparative essays is staying focused on your argument. After all, with twice as many texts, there’s twice as much chance you’re going to go off-topic! It can be very hard to synthesise your argument and keep it as waffle-free as possible, but here are some of my tips.

· Use connectives: Comparative connectives like ‘similarly’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘in contrast’ will keep you focused on the comparison, but also flag up to the examiner that you are hitting those comparison marks. The person marking your exam script will have marked hundreds of others, so it’s important to be clear that you’re talking about the assessment objectives they’re asking for to make their job easy and force them to give you the marks you deserve.

· Plan: Planning is a very simple, quick thing you can do to make sure your argument makes sense, all fits together nicely and won’t cause you to veer off course and start talking about something else. It’s easier than you’d think to go off-topic in the exam when you’re stressed, so planning is something I would always recommend.

· Explicitly use the words ‘Source A’ and ‘Source B’: Like with the connectives, this is just a clarity thing. It will make it very obvious to the examiner that you are talking about both sources, which will make them more likely to give you those comparison marks.

I hope that this has given you an idea of how to structure your comparative essays. Because English is such a personal subject, everyone writes their essays slightly differently, so feel free to change up my structure to suit you or completely discard it if it doesn’t work for you. This is just one way to structure a response out of many but play around until you find a structure that works. The more practice you can get at comparative essays the better, so do get started on those practice papers if you haven’t already!

Have any questions about how to prepare for your GCSE exams? Having problems with any hard to understand content or tricky past exam questions? Then ask Addie. Addie will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Addie will answer them in these sessions.