[Section 2 - General reflections on the 2018 exam]
[Hilary Regan] On the whole I was really impressed
with how students answered four of the 4 Assessment Objectives at once in in almost every paragraph,
so they’d start with a nice clear comparative argument, back it up with some detail from
the text, dig into that quote or that example to think about the writer’s craft and link
that to the context.
The less successful answers were those that didn’t focus on the question so much, so
maybe they told the story a little too much or they were not giving me any detail about
the text and what the writer was doing to create meaning.
It’s important not to treat contexts as if they’re separate from the rest of the
essay, so make them relevant to the question you’re answering and it’s best to not
to just learn a chunk of context that you try and put into every essay, you have to
pick and choose a bit. People tend to put a little bit much biographical context in,
a little bit is fine as long as it’s relevant to the question, but it’s not a good idea
to learn a load about your author’s life and parrot that out. It’s better to have
a range of contexts, little and often is what we’d like. Historical context is I guess
more straightforward for nineteenth-century texts, because you can think about how society
might have changed, for example attitudes to the roles of women to religion to sexuality
and issues like that. With the modern texts you can still think about historical and social
context, so perhaps the change in political climate for The Handmaid’s Tale or race
in The Lonely Londoners. You can always talk about social attitudes or audience responses,
how one audience might have responded to the text how a modern audience might respond differently.
You can think about how a text might fit into genre categories or you could think about
critical responses for example how a feminist critic or Marxist critic might interpret the
novel.
Try to get a range of contexts in, contexts doesn’t just mean one thing it should be
varied and interesting hopefully.
In a way it is more challenging to select quotes from novels, than from say poetry because
there’s so much more to choose from. The golden rule is to keep it short. You don’t
want to waste your time writing put huge big chunks of text in the exam. The other thing
to think about is whether the quotes you choose will actually enable you to write about the
writer’s craft, so make sure there’s something in there that you can analyse. Once you’ve
chosen your quotes, it’s a good idea to focus on the different things it might mean
– don’t just label it with a term then move on; but dig into the different meanings
of what the writer is doing with that quote and don’t try and use the same quotes in
every essay. You get this a lot with Wuthering Heights, A Thousand Splendid Suns and with
Frankenstein. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, they might well be relevant to
the question, but ask yourself is this the best example for the point that I’m making?
And if it is then great go on and analyse it, go into the detail of it, but if not maybe
think about is there somewhere else in the novel that would illustrate this point more
clearly or better.
The only real way to make it quicker to find quotes in the exam is to know your novels
really well. So hopefully by the time you sit the exam, you’ll have read them both
several times through, so you’ll know what happens when and where in the novel and find
particular incidents quite quickly. Some students I know like to learn sets of quotations, which
is fine and if it gives you a safety net and makes you feel a bit more secure going into
the exam then fine, but it does reduce your flexibility when it comes to answering the
question if you’ve only got one set of quotes to use. It might be a better approach to focus
your revision on maybe learning rather than single quotes incidents in the novels, so
bits that are particularly descriptive or dramatic or there’s lots you can say about,
so think about parts of the novel that have a lot of the writer’s craft evident in them
and focus your revision on those sections.