Reasonably enough, examiners expect more of students at A Level than they do at GCSE. In particular, they expect students to use a broader critical vocabulary and to be more precise when doing so.
In my experience, low-scoring answers are more often a result of linguistic imprecision than they are a product of misunderstanding a text. The ability to write clear, accurate prose in timed conditions is the first skill that any essay question will test.
Following this advice will allow you to hone the accuracy of your writing.
1. Conceive of the whole sentence that you are going to write before putting pen to page.
This feels almost patronisingly obvious advice but it's easy to forget this basic element of an essayist's task in exam conditions and too many candidates do so. Consequently, they start to write a sentence, realise that it doesn't quite express the ideas that they hoped it would, try to revise its grammar half-way through and, as a result, end up writing something quite confusing. Had they taken twenty extra seconds to consider the exact wording of that sentence before they began, such confusion could have been avoided.
2. If you are struggling to express your ideas clearly, limit the number of words that you use in each sentence.
I have met many perceptive students who try to cram too much detail into each sentence, particularly when writing opening and closing paragraphs. As a rule of thumb, sentences that exceed 30 words are likely to come across as unwieldy and unclear. If an essay makes frequent use of very long sentences, an examiner might take this as evidence of a disorganised approach to the task. Using shorter sentences allows you to write in a more focused way and enables you to build your argument patiently across successive sentences, lending your essay coherence.
3. Write formally, no matter what was said in class discussion.
In the sixth-form, you will probably find that teachers will speak to you far more colloquially in lessons than they did in earlier years, sometimes using a deliberately crude or inappropriate register to make a potentially dry subject entertaining. For instance, I recall my own English teacher describing the character of Sparkish in Wycherley's The Country Wife as a 'berk'. However, examiners still expect students to write with a high degree of formality so don't sprinkle your essays with the slang or quips that you remember from class discussions. Equally, avoid contractions – use 'cannot' rather than 'can't', for instance.
4. Develop your own critical voice: don't repeat what your teacher has said verbatim and don't rote-learn material to include in your answers.
When I mark a class's essays, I am sometimes aware that students have adopted distinctive elements of my own speech-patterns into their own answers. This is, to a small extent, inevitable: students should be taking notes in class and writing down what their teachers say. However, one's teacher's choice of phrasing does not necessarily represent the perfect way to express a particular idea. Examiners expect students to have read widely enough and considered a topic from a sufficient number of angles to be able to answer questions using their own words. If an A Level examiner marks a set of answers from the same class which makes use of very similar phrasings or verbal tics, it becomes harder for that examiner to credit any of those responses with the quality of independence of thought necessary to score the very highest marks.
Studying English at A Level involves evaluating different critics' points of view, challenging their judgements and synthesising these into a perspective unique to an individual candidate. Don't attempt to learn arguments by rote: it makes studying English very dull for you and the reiteration of rehearsed phrasings in one's answers will be obvious to examiners.
5. Broaden your vocabulary and develop your ability to synonymise.
The ability to use appropriate synonyms is one of the characteristic features of candidates who write top-band answers. Read widely, consult the dictionary and thesaurus regularly and give yourself a broader lexical pool from which to draw the appropriate word. Lower-scoring answers are often characterised by a tendency to repeat words taken from exam questions, often in a tiresomely mechanical way. A stock of appropriate synonyms will help circumvent this problem but this can only be acquired through a long-term programme of wider reading.
6. Please expunge the word 'relatable' from your critical writing.
I did not come across this word in a student's essay until about 2016 and I am still not sure how it wormed its way into the lexicon. Whatever the reason, it is not a suitable word to use in a critical essay.
Students use 'relatable' to signal that the emotional content of a text has resonated with them personally. A student might write 'Jane Eyre's experiences at Gateshead Hall are presented as highly relatable' before moving on to make another point. It is naturally gladdening – for me, for the student and for Charlotte Bronte's presiding genius – that the novel's descriptions of Jane's plight continue to move its readers 174 years hence. However, this student's use of the word 'relatable' serves as a distraction from the task of analysing why Bronte's writing has had such a potent effect.
Using the word 'relatable' as a term of praise implies that readers need to have had similar experiences to a literary character in order to appreciate their presentation in a text. Can we only relate to Jane Eyre if we were ourselves once compelled to live with a haughty, captious aunt who treated us with disdain? Obviously not – good writing doesn't have to reflect a reader's personal lived experience. Focus instead on the literary choices that Bronte makes to present Jane's experience so powerfully, for example, the way in which the curtness of her idiolect is counterpointed with the platitudinousness and sanctimony of those of Mrs Read, Mr Brocklehurst, and Miss Abbot. You can, of course, reasonably explain why cultural changes have made the young Jane a figure to whom modern readers can readily relate. For example, the twentieth century saw the idea of a child's right to dignified treatment codified into British law in detail; modern educational methods valorise young people's capacity for self-realisation, not their unquestioning obedience to adults' seniority.
Rather than contemplating whether an episode in a text is 'relatable', ask yourself why it is powerful and how its writer has made it so.
To labour my point, I would hope that none of us find the experience of Porphyria's Lover 'relatable': this does not, however, prevent Robert Browning's poem from being a chillingly potent, first-person study of psychic derangement.
7. Avoid empty adjectives: every word must earn its place in your essay.
At school, I had the good fortune to have an English teacher who hated linguistic wastefulness. His criticisms of our writing often focused on teaching us to eliminate redundant words from our essays. His particular bugbears were intensifiers: 'very', 'completely', 'constantly' and so on. Although permissable in casual discourse, these words inhibit the precision of a student's argument. Contrast the following two statements: “Othello is presented as very jealous”; “Othello is presented as so jealous that he invests passionately in all evidence that supports the 'foregone conclusion' that he has been cuckolded and vehemently rejects that which might contradict it.” Whereas the former sentence hides its insights behind the vagueness of the word 'very', the second engages precisely with the behaviour to which Othello's intense jealousy leads him.
Some students also have a habit of modifying adjectives used to describe character traits with words such as 'inherently', 'intrinsically' and 'innately', e.g 'Iago is inherently evil'. Unless your essay is engaging directly with philosophical questions concerning essentialism, it is unlikely that these words are earning their place in your essay by developing your argument.
Focus on how each word that you write advances your argument. For instance, there is no need to begin a sentence thus: 'In George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch …' The examiner will know that George Eliot wrote Middlemarch and will also be aware that it is a novel. By writing 'In Middlemarch …' instead, one uses three fewer words, freeing up time and space for you to articulate creditable insights.
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I hope that this advice proves useful to you. There is, of course, no substitute for practice as a way of improving one's written style.
If you would like any tuition in English, please get in touch at swlondontutor@yahoo.com.
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