GCSE English Literature Week 5 Exam Preparation Tips

How to structure an essay

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the final week of the Connect GCSE English Literature blog. With exam season right around the corner and most of your revision out of the way, I thought I’d take today’s post to give you some advice on how to apply all of the content you’ve learned to the actual exam paper. In English, application is just as important as your knowledge. What I mean by this is that you could know a text inside out, but if you’re not answering the question in the correct way and you’re not jumping through the right hoops according to the exam board, you aren’t necessarily going to do very well. I had lots of friends who understood the books they were writing about very well, but their marks were capped because they didn’t have a good understanding of how the exam board wanted them to respond to the questions. Luckily, this is quite easy to fix: if take a few minutes to learn what a ‘good’ GCSE English Literature essay looks like, you’ll be able to move up the levels without putting too much work in.

Essays can seem a bit daunting, especially because there isn’t one correct way of writing them. Because English is so subjective and personal, you have a bit of freedom to structure your essay how you’d like (as long as you’re hitting the right assessment objectives – more on that later). However, I’m going to be explaining my way of writing an essay in the hopes that it will give you a bit of direction, and that you might be able to borrow a few of my techniques to use in your own responses.

Basic elements of an English Literature essay

To make sure your essay gets you the highest marks possible, you need to have a basic understanding of what the exam board is asking for. You can find all of this on the AQA website, where the mark schemes outline the assessment objectives, their weightings and what the examiners are meant to be looking for when marking essays. Your essay structure must be based on the AOs that are being assessed in a given question: even if you have the best context points in the world, if AO3 isn’t being assessed in that question then you aren’t going to get any marks for it. Make a list, using the mark scheme, of which assessment objectives are being assessed in each question. This will ensure that you don’t waste time and energy writing about things that ultimately aren’t going to get you anywhere.

I also what to give some simple tips that apply to any question in English Literature. Firstly, timing. I always found exam timing very difficult: it is quite tight, and you’re inevitably going to be in a rush. Lots of people find that they actually manage to get more written than they would expect in an exam because of the adrenaline, but it’s a good idea to know roughly how much time you should be allocating to each question so that you don’t accidentally fall behind. The rule I follow is a mark per minute, so if you’re answering a 20-mark question you should be aiming to spend 20 minutes on it. Try to follow this strictly, especially in the earlier questions, because the last thing you want is to spend longer on a short question and

then not have as much time to answer the longer ones at the end which are worth more marks and therefore should be considered more of a priority.

Developing your argument

Developing a solid line of argument is important to ensure that your essay is coherent and doesn’t go off on a tangent. The best GCSE English essays are the ones that have a clear thread with an end goal in sight. This mostly comes from practice, but planning is also going to help you stay focused on your argument. When you’re planning an essay, make sure that all of your points link. This may seem obvious, but it is something that lots of students fail to do! Having clearly linked points, and flagging this up to the examiner through the use of phrases like ‘similarly’, and ‘this can also be seen in…’ demonstrates your ability to synthesise your knowledge of a text into a short, coherent response.

Another key part of your plan is ensuring that you have factored in the assessment objectives. As I mentioned, making sure that you are ticking off the right boxes in the examiner’s eyes is the only way to access the higher marks, and actively including the different AOs in your plan is going to help you remember to cover them all.

Finally, remember that you can twist the wording of the question a bit to allow you to talk about the content you’re confident with. If you are given a question on Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman, for example, you could absolutely talk about the moments in which she is not powerful, or compare Shakespeare’s presentation of her to his presentation of other women in the play. Good luck with your exams and remember to keep practising!

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.