GCSE English Literature Week 1 Exam Preparation Tips

Deciding which quotes to learn from your GCSE English Literature texts

Hi guys! This blog is designed to help you with your revision by breaking down some of the hardest elements of GCSE English Literature and giving you advice from someone who's been there and done it (me).

When I sat down to write this entry, I cast my mind back to three years ago when I was preparing for my GCSEs and tried to remember what I found daunting about my revision. Not just the content I was having a hard time understanding, but the parts of revision where I didn't even know where to begin.

For me, this was a no-brainer: QUOTES! It can differ but if you do AQA English Literature, you're studying 3 texts as well as an anthology of poetry. And given the sheer size of some of those 19th-century novels (Pride and Prejudice, I'm looking at you, those are a lot of words to be digesting). Memorising quotes is something that everyone finds annoying, but even before you can do that you have to work out which quotes you want to learn. How are you supposed to sift through that many pages of various books trying to boil them down into 10-20 quotes that will allow you to answer any exam question that might thrown at you? This was the biggest question I had, and once I'd hacked it, my revision suddenly seemed a lot more manageable.

So in the spirit of generosity, I won't force you to tackle that problem yourselves. Here is my advice for deciding which quotes to learn for your exams.

First of all, and I know no one likes to hear this, look through the notes you already have on the text. Your teachers bring certain quotes to your attention for a reason, so the best place to start is any class notes or worksheets you've accumulated over the last two years. Which quotes came up the most in your discussions? Which do you have the most annotations for? These are the ones you want to be honing in on.

This is because picking multi-functional quotes that could fit into a range of essay answers means that the list of quotes you'll have to learn will massively reduce. And that is the goal! Why learn 50 niche quotes when you could learn 15 that apply to all sorts of themes and characters? Also, this approach will be much less time consuming than poring over an entire Victorian novel. If you do have time for that then that's brilliant, but let's face it, most of us probably have better things to be doing.

My next port of call would be the AQA website (obviously don’t head here if your exam board isn’t AQA!). Looking at the past papers will help you get an idea of the kind of questions you need to be preparing for, but the mark scheme can also be very valuable when choosing quotes. In the mark scheme, there is always a chunk of indicative content which the examiners expect students to write about for a given question. These are a perfect place to find quotes that are a) exam-board approved and b) popular choices. Knowing the quotes that the exam board expect you to know is always a good thing to do!

Another great place to look is websites like SparkNotes (even if your teachers tell you not to use them) and revision guides if you have access to them. These condensed interpretations of texts are really helpful: they give you a summary of the key themes, events, characters and, most importantly for today, quotes. You'll find that for any given book, these kinds of websites will probably churn up the same 10-15 quotes. Learn these! When you're revising for your exams, the most popular and well-known quotes are often the best. Don't worry about going off the beaten track, these quotes are the most well-known ones for a reason!

I would always suggest thinking about the key themes and characters in a text when trying to find quotations. These you can find, again, on the exam board website or a revision guide. You want to make sure you're covering all your bases: when preparing Macbeth, for example, you want to make sure that you haven't only learnt quotes about ambition. Guilt, fate and loyalty are equally important themes. As I said though, the same quotes can often cover more than one theme or character, and I'd always advise doing this where you can. Work smarter, not harder.

Something that not many people think of but that I found very useful is e-books. If you have a pdf version of a text (you should be able to find these online for free), you can use the search function to look for specific words. For example if you wanted to find a quote about the motif of blood in Macbeth, you could get up the pdf, type 'blood' into the search bar and see what comes up. How does the portrayal of blood change throughout the play? How do different characters relate to this motif?

These approaches helped me cut my revision time down massively, and I hope they will do the same for you. Once you've figured out which quotes you want to learn, it's time to get out the flashcards! Good luck and remember only to learn as many as you need. There's no point in going overboard, you won't be able to fit 30 quotes into a 30-mark essay!

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.