Memorising Essays (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter tlv6554
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It works differently for everyone, you won't be able to find the right answer. Some people do better by memorising and adapting to the question, some people work off memorising quotes and techniques. Do what works for you, it's that simple
strawberrye
Premium Member
Ideally, the latter-but because some people have exam freeze and can potentially forget everything-they might find it safer to have pre-structured paragraphs to give them a little bit of extra guidance and back-up.
mrstripedshades
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I tried to memorise essays for this exam, but really only Module A fit it perfectly with very minor argument based adaptations. Module C fit it 85-90% and Module B didn't fit it at all.
I think you can easily get away with memorising essays for module's where they dont specify, but its very risky to do so with others. That being said, you have a lot of time and could definitely just get to the point where you don't need to and right stellar essays without memorisation.
Also, I didn't really memorise exactly word for word, because A) I didn't have time, I literally 'perfected' and started memorising my quotes/essay the night before, I memorised 4 Lessing quotes 20 minutes before the exam, this really saved my ass because otherwise my band 6 hopes were gone. I had worked on them for the previous week or so as in improving it, but I never tried to memorise it. B) I Found it pretty pointless and a waste of time (as in attempting to rewrite your essay word for word).
Essay plans did wonders for me in memorisation, even though I never used them before.
And I think over time if you write the same type of essay/analysis/argument across the essays you right in the year, they become ingrained in your long term memory anyway. Thats why I didnt really have trouble memorising the night before in terms of Mod A & C (had a bit in terms of quotes for Speeches, I only did paragraphs for Sadat & Keating and decided on quotes for rest of the speeches the night before thanks to some mates lol), though I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
Also, a thing that really helps me in English I think is I way work WAY better under pressure for English usually, as opposed to pretty much every other subject. I've stayed up to 1am writing an essay for an Assessment and getting near full marks on it 1st period in the morning, of course cramming works but I think for English I felt that it was my best subject throughout high school and I really needed to pick it up.
In the holidays, I reckon you should A) finalise on a creative idea, B) have everything for AOS sorted in terms of quotes/essay, ofc u can improve it throughout year and C) Either read up on or read your texts.
This wont take you very long at all, you can do a bit a day and at maximum it will add up to like 10 hours for A &B as you would already have a base built up class.
I think you can easily get away with memorising essays for module's where they dont specify, but its very risky to do so with others. That being said, you have a lot of time and could definitely just get to the point where you don't need to and right stellar essays without memorisation.
Also, I didn't really memorise exactly word for word, because A) I didn't have time, I literally 'perfected' and started memorising my quotes/essay the night before, I memorised 4 Lessing quotes 20 minutes before the exam, this really saved my ass because otherwise my band 6 hopes were gone. I had worked on them for the previous week or so as in improving it, but I never tried to memorise it. B) I Found it pretty pointless and a waste of time (as in attempting to rewrite your essay word for word).
Essay plans did wonders for me in memorisation, even though I never used them before.
And I think over time if you write the same type of essay/analysis/argument across the essays you right in the year, they become ingrained in your long term memory anyway. Thats why I didnt really have trouble memorising the night before in terms of Mod A & C (had a bit in terms of quotes for Speeches, I only did paragraphs for Sadat & Keating and decided on quotes for rest of the speeches the night before thanks to some mates lol), though I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
Also, a thing that really helps me in English I think is I way work WAY better under pressure for English usually, as opposed to pretty much every other subject. I've stayed up to 1am writing an essay for an Assessment and getting near full marks on it 1st period in the morning, of course cramming works but I think for English I felt that it was my best subject throughout high school and I really needed to pick it up.
In the holidays, I reckon you should A) finalise on a creative idea, B) have everything for AOS sorted in terms of quotes/essay, ofc u can improve it throughout year and C) Either read up on or read your texts.
This wont take you very long at all, you can do a bit a day and at maximum it will add up to like 10 hours for A &B as you would already have a base built up class.
Esse
xD
As Ryan mentioned, it is different for the person. Personally for me, all my essays were answered to extremely broad questions, therefore I was able to remember them and easily adapt them to the question, which is what I did for HSC. But once again, it depends for the person
mrstripedshades
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How many words were all your essays?
this is also why I decided to memorise tbh, my writing speed is pretty slow. I probs did around 2.9k-3.2k words in exam.
Flop21
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Mine were like ~1k each, maybe a tiny bit less because -intro and all that stuff. But lol I ended up forgetting things, and really butchered the essays. But would have been okay if I had started memorising and recalling earlier.
mrstripedshades
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Yea imo my mod a essay was really really good so I did 1.2k or even 1.3k words for it. Took me around 45 minutes then I did mod c in 40 but probably 900ish words. Mod B the specified speech threw off my entire preparation and most was improvisation probably 900 in 35 for it, as I had really low sleep like a couple hours I'm just hoping my sentences didn't go to shit for mod b, as it was pretty much a fresh essay