In Part 1, I talked about answering the question and structuring your essay. Now I'm going to talk about a few other little details that you might need to know.
A Very Quick Word on Course Concepts
Course concepts are all hidden in the educational waffle in the syllabus. Yes, that thing that hardly anyone reads. If you do read it, I'd recommend that you only read the 3B one or the condensed one with both units- the 3B syllabus has a couple more dot points than the 3A one and, apart from that, there's only a one word difference between the two so it's not worth wasting your time reading both.
The long and short of it is, there's only a limited amount of stuff that they can ask you about. This helps when studying, because then you could just look at how each text addresses each course concept. Of course, not every text is geared to address every single one, but it's nice to see how many different ways you can look at a text (or at least I find that it helps me to feel reasonably confident in the exam room).
Some more reasons why you'll need to know the course concepts are a) because they give you something to write about in your thesis statements and b) they give you something to look for in your Close Readings. If you can't find anything to write about, just think, "Hmm, is there any way I could tie this to genre? Context? Intertextuality?"
Anyway, without further ado, here is a condensed list of course concepts that could be thrown at you. Make sure to get yourself familiarised with them.
- Genres and generic conventions
- Language
- Context- social, historical, cultural, reader's own context
- Values and ideologies
- Aesthetic functions
- Reading intertextually
- Discourses- different ways of thinking and talking about the world
- How nations recognise themselves through their literary texts (an example of a question that asks this is "How might literary works help us to recognise ourselves as Australians?")
- Reading practices- feminism, Marxism, new-historicism, post-colonialism etc.
More Big Words
Sometimes the idea that you want to talk about involves some other big word, like postmodernism, determinism and so on. If you are going to use these words, make sure that 1) you make sure to tie your reading to those course concepts and 2) you ensure that you fully understand whatever term that you're trying to use. I tend to stray away from big words so my advice here would be to write some practice essays and show your teacher so that at least you know whether you're on the right track or whether you should avoid using these terms until you learn more.
Using Quotes, or "[Making] Strategic and Cticial Use of Supporting Evidence Including Quotes and/or Examples"
As I've stated previously, you need to back up all your points with evidence. To assist you there, I'm now going to explain how to integrate your evidence.
Most of your evidence will probably come in the form of quotes. Therefore, it helps to use quotes fluently. It's a bit hard to explain this, but I'll have a go. Basically, only use the part of the quote that you really need, and try and make it flow into the sentence as much as possible, such that the sentence would make sense even without the quotation marks. You shouldn't have to use the word "quote" to talk about quotes. In a take-home essay, you need to put the page number of the quote in brackets (parentheses for any US folks out there reading this) after the quote. If you're referencing a scholarly article, you need to put the author's surname in the brackets too. Here's some examples of using quotes:
- Huberto initially "[scratches] a living through hustling and petty thievery" (62), and Eva is tossed from employer to employer to earn money for her madrina.
- He refers to Claudius, his uncle who has become king so soon after his father's death, as "a little more than kin, and less than kind."
- Not knowing what to do or say, to have lines "not simply forgotten but never learned" is an "actor's traditional nightmare" (Zeifman 205).
You might also notice that I've used square brackets in the first quote. Square brackets are used if you need to alter a verb tense or a pronoun to fit your sentence. They can also be used if you need to change a lowercase letter to uppercase (but I don't think it's absolutely necessary to use square brackets here). In the first quote, I think that it was originally "scratching," but it wouldn't make sense to say "Huberto initially scratching a living." Thus, I had to change the verb tense to let the sentence flow.
Another use of square brackets in quotes that you might have seen is the word [sic]. You probably won't have to use this yourself, unless you're quoting something from the first part of Flowers for Algernon or another text with deliberate spelling and grammar errors. Simply put, if what you're quoting has spelling or grammatical errors, you can use [sic] to show that you are simply keeping the original spelling and grammar intact.
We're nearly there. Just one more quick point!
Expression of Ideas
Expression of ideas isn't something that I can just explain. Everyone has their own unique writing styles and it is up to you to develop yours. Reading and writing are probably the two best ways to help you achieve this. Your teachers will probably also be willing to help if you show them essay drafts.
I wish you luck on your adventures studying Lit!
For fellow Year 12s: Just two more Lit exams EVER (unless you fail and have to sit the sup- apparently the sup's really easy though, which is good). Yay! No more timed Lit essays EVER after these two last exams!
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