TASK 10 – GENERAL ESSAY WRITING ADVICE
FOR THE EXAM
During the Intermediate 2 course you will get lots of chances to write
essays about the texts you study. At first your teacher may support you
in some of the following ways
• giving you a plan to follow
• making a plan with the class
• letting you plan in groups or pairs
• letting you use your texts and notes while you write the essay
• giving you as long as you need to finish the essay I letting you take the
essay home to finish it.
However, by the time you get to the exam you need to be able to quickly
choose, plan and write your essays, two of them, in 90 minutes.
Two things will help you with this.
Firstly you need to know your texts really well before you go in to the
exam, and you need to know all your notes and materials about those
texts. That way you can pick out the right material to use to answer the
essay questions you have chosen.
Think of it like this. You probably have lots of clothes in your wardrobe.
If you know what you’ve got, and you know what you’re about to do, you
can pick out the right outfit for the situation. The clothes you could
choose to go camping wouldn’t be the same ones you would choose to go to
a party. The information you use to write an essay about how the author
makes you feel sympathy for a character might not be the same
information you would use to write an essay about how the writer deals
with a particular theme or issue.
Secondly, you need to make a quick plan in the exam before you write
each essay. It can be a list of the five key ideas you want to base your
main body paragraphs on, or a spider plan with a leg for each main body
paragraph, but however you do it you need to know what you are going to
say to answer the question.
Sometimes, pupils go in to the exam and panic. No matter how scared you
are, don’t be tempted to write about the Film and TV Drama option if you
haven’t been taught that in class. Even if you are Scotland’s biggest
Eastenders fan, don’t write about what you haven’t been trained to write
about. The same applies to the language section. There might well be a
question in there about teenage slang, and you may be a slangy teenager,
but don’t try to write about it if you haven’t been taught it.
Another danger in the exam is that you might write the essay you want to
write, and not the one the examiners want. It’s really important to learn
essay skills — and that’s what this whole chapter has been about — but
there’s no point trying to learn a particular essay off by heart, even if it’s
one you got a good mark for in class. You can only write about what the
examiners want on that day.
Let’s end with a piece of positive advice. If at all possible, you should try
to make one of your two exam essays be about poetry. There’s much less
risk with poetry that you will fall into retelling the plot, which can
sometimes happen with essays about novels or plays. Also, because poems
are very short and the language in them has to work very hard, poems are
stuffed with recognisable techniques. That it makes it very easy for you
to identify these techniques and to write about them, which immediately
makes your essays more analytical, and makes you seem more clever. Being
short also makes poems easier to know, and easier to learn quotations
from.