Know the important stuff
I guess it’s crucial that you are familiar with the plot but that’s hardly the wisest thing to read / review before the exam. Reading the novel again, or worse, SparkNotes (or its equivalents) will only make you narrate and describe and narrate and describe — and do badly. It’s not the ‘O’ Levels and you can’t get away with basic comprehension of the text. Well… maybe an ‘S’ at best.
Be very clear instead about the writers’ CONCERNS – whether it’s Archer’s dilemma, Iago’s malcontent, Blanche’s delusions, jealousy, love, hatred – and the METHODS the writer employs to present these concerns. Obviously, you should be able to commit to memory key quotations (i.e. MEMORISE SOME EVIDENCE) from each of your set texts. Yes, you have your exam copy but if you don’t know what evidence to look for, it’s kind of pointless to flip through your text during the exam. You have the lecture notes and slides available for download, so start early.
Make your ‘exam copies’ very, very useful
A point worth reiterating ad nauseum. Transfer the key quotes highlighted during lectures and tutorials to your exam copy. You want to make it useful. Colour code your text by character (e.g. blue for Ellen in The Age of Innocence) and concern (e.g. green for jealousy in Othello) for easy reference. If you wanted to look for lines from Sue Bayliss or Stella DuBois, you’d thank yourself you bought extra highlighters to pick out their parts. Remember to take out post-it notes and other unauthorised material from your exam copy though!
Don’t forget our rules and regulations on annotating your text right here on this blog!
Re-organise your notes
While I try to organise most of my lectures by concerns, I know it is not always possible or efficient for everything.
For my JC1 students, you’d know that Mr. Fahy’s slides on Othello are organised by Acts and Scenes. You should also be aware that the section you’d be tested on in Paper 3 will be essay questions based on character, concern and method. Unlike P1, there’s NO passage-based question, so you won’t be tested on your knowledge of ‘Acts and Scenes’. This means you should keep an active log (on MS Word? GoogleDoc? Old school journal?) of methods, concerns and evidence organised by character or concern. For instance, you may want to create a document on the character of Othello and catalogue key evidence and key methods (e.g. you can track the disintegration of his dialogue… from high style to low style, iambic pentameter to prosaic etc).
For my JC2 students, you know that the above method is not very effective for Paper 3 Section B. Organise by METHODS so that you make it easy for yourself. You should be able to compare setting in Othello and Streetcar easily when discussing the concern of the individual’s place in his society, so you’d want to create tables (in your word processing app, not new furniture). The same goes for the dialogue / language used by Othello vis-a-vis Stanley, or Iago vis-a-vis Blanche or Stella vis-a-vis Desdemona. If you haven’t started, now is still a good time to do so. You won’t be able to finish in time, but your real goal is really to craft a crazy-awesome revision tool just before the Prelims. Commit it to memory from the Prelims to the big ‘A’ Levels.
Review, refer, rework
Your own essays (with my feedback) are your BEST step towards excellence (or improvement, if we want to be modest). Always, always keep in mind where your strengths lie (I do try to point them out, even if sometimes quite briefly!) and what you can do better in (most of my comments will be ‘critical’, even if I give you a top mark!). Is it close analysis and elaboration that you’re lacking? Did you not identify the key ideas / concerns in the poem or passage?
Once you get that done, choose to refer to a few essays from your friends / cohort mates that may have covered ideas that you haven’t or have strengths that you don’t have. Learn from each other! That’s kind of the point of the presentation-heavy tutorials and the uploading of gigantic PDF copies of good essays.
From these good examples, you can then re-work your own essays into something better. If you don’t have the time to do a new draft, try to take on my suggestions and rewrite certain paragraphs. If you don’t even have time for that, mentally ‘add’ ideas and analysis to your past work!
Practise, practise, practise
There’s just nothing like practice. You wouldn’t imagine an athlete watching video days on end without actually doing PT or drills, right? The same goes for the exam: in order to do well, you need to be able to execute what you have learned (identifying methods, discussing effects, concerns etc.) in a short space of time brilliantly. Reading and understanding is foundational but DOING is what gets you there.
For JC1 students, find time out of your tight schedule to practise writing THREE essays in THREE hours on P1 poetry, a passage from The Age of Innocence (use the revision passage from Ch 4?) and an essay question on Othello (use the 2012 JC1 Mid-Year paper?).
For JC2 students, you should find the 2 x 2 hours format a lot more manageable than a 3-hour paper… but do cap your ‘practice essays’ to one hour. Most of you would have completed an outline for Mr. Na on the sample paper Section B question. Do the other question. You are also familiar with how we set P1 questions; find the ‘gaps’ from our tutorial presentations (essay questions and passages) and do them!
So… there you have it. Ask me questions, force me to make further recommendations or just leave a comment!
Livre Or Die 