Veteran HSC English marker reveals ‘very helpful’ way to avoid losing marks
A veteran marker has revealed a small tweak that can get you extra marks in the exam — and one very common mistake to avoid.
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One of the state’s leading English teachers whose students topped the state in the subject last year has revealed his top tips ahead of this week’s HSC exams.
St Catherine’s School’s head of English Kyle Caputo gave the advice specifically for students studying the Standard English course. That exam will be on Thursday and students must write essays about two texts they have studied in class.
They must also complete a third section which will give students a stimulus and respond to it with either a piece of creative, discursive or persuasive writing — depending on the question.
REGURGITATING A PRE-PREPARED ESSAY
One of the biggest pitfalls comes from anxiety about not being able to address the question on the day but memorising a response and just repeating it on the day of the exam is one of the biggest mistakes they can make.
Students really need to remember that HSC is not just testing you on your content knowledge, it’s also testing you on your agility of thinking and how flexible you can be with what you know.
One way students can get around this is to loosely prepare responses that have gaps within them, so they might be able to memorise particular quotes and particular analysis of those pieces of textual evidence — but will be able to use them to actually answer the question they get asked on exam day.
In the lead up to the exam, students could turn it into a bit of a game and could print out different practice questions on strips of paper and just pull one out and give themselves 10 minutes to practise a an introduction paragraph and write an essay plan which specifically answers what the question is asking.
USE OF VERBS
This is a little tweak which could be a very helpful last minute.
One thing that really does make a big difference is the verbs that they’re using in their sentences.
For example, weaker students might say that an author ‘shows’ this or they ‘demonstrate’ that. But a stronger response will say an author ‘argues’ or an author ‘critiques’ or an author ‘glorifies’ a particular idea or theme in the book or text they have studied.
So these verbs are a little bit more evaluative, and they’ll actually try to get a little bit more towards what the purpose of the text is and what the message is, rather than just saying an author shows this and shows that.
KNOWLEDGE OF TEXTUAL EVIDENCE AND ANALYSIS
Avoid just picking quotes from the first few chapters of the book.
A big pitfall for students quite often is that they might pull their evidence from just in the first few chapters of a novel, but the really strong response engages with the beginning, middle and end of the text holistically. So that really shows the markers that they understand the text as a whole and how it all works together.
LANGUAGE AND CONTROL OF EXPRESSION
A really good thing to have throughout the essay responses is connective words like however and moreover and therefore between sentences.
That means there’s a really nice flow of the response. Sometimes in a really strong response, there is a sense that between the first paragraph and the second paragraph, the second paragraph might start with furthermore, to kind of add on to or amplify the idea from the first paragraph.
The markers are looking for an essay which develops the concept outlined in the introduction. And the following paragraphs are not just a kind of museum tour of theme one, and now here’s theme two, and here’s theme three. But there is a sense that as the essay progresses, there is also a progression of the ideas in the essay.
MAKE SURE YOU PLAN THE ESSAY
What I really recommend to students is to think about their essay and maybe structure even in their planning time as a bit of a flow chart. So you kind of think about like X leads to Y leads to Z.
CLOSE STUDY OF TEXT
The second essay students must write in the exam is a “close study” of the text. And the question can be a range of things, so it’s really important to look at all those textual elements — the plot of the text, the conflict, the characterisation, the setting, use of motifs and symbolism, because those are what you could be specifically asked about.
BE JUDICIOUS ABOUT QUOTES
The bare minimum number of quotes a student might have memorised could be three or four from the text.
But I think it’s good to have some extras just because the question might be asking the student to address a range of different things. So they don’t want to get stuck just having just the minimum amount of evidence memorised and not really being able to address the specific question that they’re asked.
So if they have more quotes, 15 or even 20, they just have a bit more flexibility and a little bit more wiggle room with the question on the day of the exam.
Frequently, really strong responses might just have particular short phrases that are memorised and they might be just a cluster of phrases from the text.
For example, the text might just have a motif, a recurring symbol relating to the weather. And maybe there’s just a cluster of quotes that are relating to that particular symbol and that could just be used as a piece of evidence in answering the question.
A common pitfall is memorising a really long quote and just inserting it into an essay. And that only shows the marker that a student has just memorised a quote. Ideally they want to show they’re an expert on that text and have a really clear, fluent understanding of how that text is creating meaning.
SECTION 3 CAN BE A BIT OF A WILDCARD BUT CAN BE PREPARED
In this section, students can be asked to write a piece of creative writing, a persuasive text or a discursive text.
What I recommend to students is that they have a really good piece of creative writing that is going to be very highly patterned and kind of intricate in the way that it’s crafted memorised and practices.
Students should consider using devices like a flashback or a series of flashbacks so the narrative is a little bit more intricate and it’s kind of weaving between the past and the present. That makes the creative writing a little bit more sophisticated and it shows the marker that you’re really crafting your response.
Something I find that also works really well is that you can always have a really strong opening paragraph that might link to an emotion. So you have a really strong, vivid paragraph that might explore the emotion of anger, or the emotion of regret, or the emotion of hope. And the student might just write 100 words vividly describing that emotion and that way they have that memorised — and whatever the stimulus is, it’s likely that they’re going to have to discuss an emotion at some point. So they could include this very vivid paragraph at the start, the middle or the end of an imaginative writing piece.
And the same piece could also be used for a discursive piece of writing like a personal essay.
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