Comparative Text Response: Study Plan

How did I get here?

When I entered year 11, English was my worst subject. By the time I graduated, I was top of my year level with a study score of 50. 

Back then, I was not a humanities person, and the things English teachers said to me made no sense. I couldn’t explain why I knew a certain character was evil any more than I could tell you the tone of a newspaper article. It felt like everyone at my school who was good at English just had some magic knack for it, and the path to improvement was impenetrable. My teachers provided consistently vague feedback. Criteria such as “sophisticated application of evidence” didn’t seem materially different from “adequate use of evidence” in the slightest. 

Over the next two years, I slowly learned methods for studying English. I figured out ways of planning for various essays that ensured I would always have something relevant to talk about in exams. I worked out how to plan for themes in advance, so I could just glance at a topic and immediately know how to start responding to it.

I discovered a way of studying English which anyone could follow, and which would produce consistently good results. And I finally found the difference between the vague criteria English teachers are so obstinately reliant on. 

So what exactly did I do to make comparative essays easy?

How to Study for Comparative

Good English revision is a mixture of reading, writing, and thinking. There are more and less efficient ways to do this. We are opting only for the most efficient ways, because we want to get great results in as little time as possible. 

Studying for any text response requires two key things:

1. Good understanding of the ‘facts’ of the text, and
2. Good understanding of their ‘significance’. 

The first of these means that you can’t have any errors in your memory of the plot or characters. Misremembering a character or a quote more than twice will often immediately drop you below an 8/10 in VCAA assessment. You just haven’t shown that you know what’s going on. I don't say that as a hard "rule" markers are given, but I know that when students give me essays with plot errors, it comes across poorly.

Understanding the significance is a little harder, but I separate it into two categories:

1. Character psychology
2. Author intention

Each event or quote in the text either represents something the author thinks about society or people, or reveals something about a character’s personality and inner motivations. This may sound a little vague at the moment, but stay with me: you already know more than 50% of students. We’ll come back to this. Check out the post on comparative essay structure if you want to see how this works in practice.

Now, you know teachers are looking for two things: do you know what happens, and can you analyse it at least a little? Once you have this under your belt, your next task is just to work out how to show this most effectively.

My Study Process

The following are the key steps you should take when studying for any text response:

1. Read the text in its entirety. You can read a summary first if you want. In fact, I often recommend this for texts like those by Shakespeare, since they can be quite opaque. Even if there are people at your school who get better marks and claim to have not read the book, don’t skip this step. 
2. Create a character list. You will come back to this when planning and revising to make sure you have included all relevant characters in your essay. Every time you find a new character when reading, add their name to your list. Write a 1-2 sentence bio to remind you what they do. As you read, try to get a sense of each character’s personality, and make a mental note of this. Don’t worry about adding any more detail at this stage - we are trying to do the most efficient study in the least time. Finding quotes isn’t that worth it at the moment (as we lack global context), so I wouldn't bother taking notes beyond underlining in my text.
3. Gather a large bank of resources on themes. Find as many study guides as you can. Look online, in your school or local library, find essays from previous high-scorers, or scour Facebook groups. You want to have as much material about your texts as possible. 
4. Read through all this material. Make sure you are reading it actively, thinking carefully about the ideas the authors are making, and ensuring you understand them. For each paragraph you read, think the following, and make a note of both: a) What is the key idea here? and b) What characters, examples or quotes do they use to back it up? Examples of how I do this will be released shortly when I upload my notes for various texts here. For anyone studying The Crucible / The Dressmaker, these are almost ready.
5. Note: when you write about themes, you have to produce interesting perspectives on them. There are two ways to do this: come up with all the ideas yourself, or build on the ideas of others. The second is much easier. Reading all the suggested material above will help you to find and build on these ideas. 
6. Finally, gather a huge list of essay prompts, organise them by theme, and work through them systematically until you have at least created a plan for each. Write at least one full essay per plan. 

Why do I suggest this plan?

English is assessed through essays. Excellent essays are a combination of clear language, good structure, and interesting thought. Reading through all the themes will give you some interesting thought to work with. Reading the text and learning characters will patch holes in your factual knowledge. Planning topics will teach you structure, and also help you further develop your interesting ideas. Lastly, writing the essays will help you develop your prose. Yes, it's a lot. But if you spend 2 hours a night solving problems for bio or maths, there's no reason you can't apply the same time to the method described above. I can almost guarantee you're spending less time on English than all your other subjects, largely because you don't know how to study.

In effect, you just have to plan and practice writing as many essays as possible, to as high a standard as possible. The better your thoughts about a theme are, the better your essays in exams will be. It is not easy. English study can really tire your brain out. But, you really will improve if you are able to follow this strategy. Maybe with a little guidance, just to check you’re on the right path.

As you can see, however, essays are the core of your assessment, and thus the core of your study. Let’s dive into how to write fantastic comparative essays in our next post.