Today we're going to be talking about memorizing essays and i feel like this is a hotly debated
topic and every single year i always get people asking how do i memorize my essays so if you stay
and watch the end of this video you're going to learn what it means to memorize an essay
the pros and cons and how you should be practicing in terms of a memorized essay in preparation
for an assessment hi everyone i'm lisa and on this channel i give you weekly advice to help you boost
your english studies if you're new here then make sure you subscribe or even if you're not new here
make sure you subscribe and hit the notification buttons because every single week i offer you
incredible piece of information to help you boost your marks so i want to start off with this
disclaimer saying that i actually don't believe in you completely 100 memorizing an essay and then
just regurgitating that in an exam there's a few downfalls to memorizing essays and it comes down
to the fact that with english as a subject you'll pretty much never get the same essay topic twice
even if it's something super similar there's going to be a switch out in the keywords or perhaps the
end of the question is a do you agree instead of a discuss and just those slight changes can actually
make all the difference in how you're going to answer your essay so while this video will be
about memorizing bits and components of essays i just want to put it out there that you can't
just rely on memorization to carry you through it's really obvious when a student is forcing
something to work with an essay prompt rather than actually looking at the essay prompt in front of
them and actually thinking about it and responding to it in a way that it deserves and i think when
people ask how do i memorize an essay they're sort of not realizing this really important aspect of
english and that's that with every single essay topic you're going to have to approach it in a
slightly different way and that's sort of what makes the difference between somebody who's gonna
get that a plus and just blow an examiner's mind away as opposed to somebody who memorizes a really
good essay but probably only gets an a so my first piece of advice for this is don't think of it as
memorizing entire essay but i like to think of it as templates that you can use and reuse again
with templates they're things that you write up where it's sort of like the foundation of
your essay or perhaps it's the foundation of the way you're going to approach a particular theme
and with a template as we generally understand it it's something that is the beginning but you need
to fill in the blanks to really make it shine and i completely get why people would use templates
heading into an exam you know you've done all this hard work and maybe you've written up particular
sentences that you absolutely love and you know you've just nailed it with those sentences and
they're packed with the right sort of vocabulary you know it's just gonna shine in front of an
examiner and you don't wanna let all of that go when you're in an exam and i totally get that
so rather than memorizing a complete essay that's like 1 000 words that you're going to force to
make it work with an essay topic i am an advocate of memorizing bits and pieces that you know you
can recycle over and over again so what are these things that you can recycle it could be topic
sentences and you could write up particular topic sentences for certain themes because we know that
when it comes to essay topics there's only so many number of themes that are going to come up right
so if you're sort of slightly prepared for that already then you can go into your exam with more
confidence and know that you're not just going to completely mind blank when you're in the exam or
let's say it's a particular quote that you really love and there's a specific way that you like to
talk about it every time you come across an essay and every time you use the same quote you pretty
much talk about it in the same way you elaborate it with using the same words and you touch on the
same sort of themes so that's also super handy so now that we know what parts of essays we can use
as templates let's think about advice two which is how do we actually get memorizing my second point
here would be to just purely practice writing i am really not a big fan of just sitting there
memorizing an essay and just trying to re-read it a hundred times so that it sticks in your
brain like that's not an efficient time at all and you probably know this and you know
i want you to be productive and efficient and yeah that's just not the way so see you later instead
what i want you to do is actually practice the writing component of your exam preparation which
you need to do anyway so sort of two things that you're knocking out with one stone by practicing
writing and reusing these bits of templates you get to know a couple of things firstly how well
your template works with different types of essays and where the limitations in these templates are
so let's say if you've got a particular quote that you love to talk about and you're really trying
to make it work with this new essay topic that you've come across but you find that it's just
not working and if it's not working don't force it i think that's a really important part to remember
you can't just force something to work it's going to be really obvious to examiner
and you're just wasting your time and wasting that valuable real estate in terms of your word count
the second thing here is when you practice writing whatever you're rewriting and rewriting again
naturally gets embedded in your brain and you'll come to find that in the future when you want to
reuse these templates it just becomes more and more natural for you which has the third added
bonus of having a piece of writing that comes naturally and flows and makes sense and syncs in
with the essay topic the third and final thing i will say here in terms of memorizing essays
is it's incredibly valuable to actually go back and rewrite essays so when we rewrite essays it
has that same sort of effect in terms of okay i've done this before let me repeat again and
it'll stick to my memory right but it's also going to force you to rethink about how you approach
essay topics so whenever i repeat writing an essay i don't just try to go okay how could i just
rewrite this in the same way but in a better way instead i look at it almost with completely fresh
eyes and go you know what it's one week later i'm one week smarter potentially so
how could i potentially break this essay topic down and is there a better way of doing this
then you might find that as you keep improving improving your templates will keep evolving as
well and that's what's really essential when it comes to memorizing essays i feel like it just
completely disregards the fact that you are always getting better as a student and when you memorize
an essay and you're like yep at this point in time i think this is the best thing i've ever written
but then you use that same essay two months later it might not be what you're actually capable of
and i think that's the thing that really strikes me when people ask me about memorizing essays
i think these type of people when i'm talking to you if you're somebody who thinks you need
to memorize essays i think you're undermining yourself and you don't believe in yourself
enough to think that you're capable of going into that exam and having some flexibility so that you
could write your best essay ever in a way i think it's truly a disservice to yourself if you only
think that memorizing an essay is what's going to pull you through and get those great marks like
i completely get why you'd want to use a template and reuse those beautiful words that you've picked
up along the way or a particular explanation that you just know is going to kill it and
is completely unique to what other students are saying but with all the steps that i mentioned
before which is to create templates practice writing and practice rewriting essays you
should constantly be evolving and constantly be getting better so the main point of this video is
look it's up to you if you want to memorize essays and go for it
but i think there's a better way for you and i hope you understand where i'm coming from if
you found this video helpful then i'd love for you to like it it would mean a lot to
me to understand sort of what pieces of advice you find are helpful and what's not and please
make sure you subscribe to this channel for more awesome advice and i'll link you to my
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