What should I be preparing these holidays?
January English Preparation To Get A 40+: A Three Part Series
What is the best way to start the year off right? How do you give yourself the best chance at getting a 40+ in English? Most students will be taking this month off to relax. This means you have the chance to get ahead of 80% of other students if you start now.
However, just starting isn’t enough: if you don’t have a targeted plan which tackles the most relevant (and tricky) aspects of English, you’ll just waste your summer highlighting books and adding sticky notes.
Below are the top 14 things you should be doing (mostly in order) to get the head start no one else will tell you about (broken down by unit).
I’ve also added approximate time limits for each task so you get to finish all this quickly and spend as much of your summer having fun as possible.
Part 1
~ Creative, Text Analysis and Comparative ~
1. Read all your texts cover to cover and make sure you understand them (~1 week per text).
2. Read at least two summaries of your texts to revise the events and characters in them (~1 hr per text).
3. If there are any parts of your texts you don’t understand, read over online summaries until you get them. You won’t have that much time to deep dive on characters (etc) you don’t understand once the year starts, so it’s better to get this done early and revise later as necessary. (~1 hr per text).
4. Find EVERY study guide or online summary for your texts that you can and read all their sections on themes. Start thinking about how the different summaries talk about the different themes. Start to develop your own perspectives on these themes. (~2-3 hrs per text, though you could spend up to two weeks per text or even more).
Bonus: read as many character summaries as you can and start working out how each character thinks and operates. This is especially important for the creative. (~3 hrs per text).
5. Start collecting a giant list of past essay prompts for your texts. You only have to do this for texts you’ll be writing essays on (so don’t worry about doing it for a text you only have a creative SAC on, unless you think you’ll choose to write on it for the exam). This will help you HUGELY when it comes to SAC and exam preparation later. (~1 hr per text).
6. For the text you are writing your creative on, make a list of (at least) five key features of the author’s writing. For example, these might include symbolism, 1950s Australian slang, switching between past and present scenes, etc. If you need inspiration, look through this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_narrative_techniques, or this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_literary_terms. (~2 hrs).
Part 2:
Part 3:
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