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Have you ever spent hours crafting the perfect essay in preparation for an assessment? You identified your arguments, searched long and hard for the finest quotes, formulated your analysis with complex vocabulary and made sure the response was exam-ready. Yet, when you used that same essay response in your assessment under exam conditions, you received 14/20. How can that be? Chances are, you fell into the trap of relying on memorisation. Somewhere along the line, somebody t

One of the biggest reasons students hate English is because they think they're trying to guess the ‘correct’ interpretation. They're not. And the sooner you stop treating English like a guessing game, the sooner you'll start writing essays that actually stand out. If you study English for long enough, you may notice that there never really seems to be a right answer. I like to think of the subject like an artwork in a gallery. Thousands of people walk past it every day, each

I am sorry to break it to you like this, but the person who will end up marking your HSC responses probably knows the text better than you do. If your essay merely serves as a reminder of the text’s basic contents, it will struggle to stand out to a marker who has already read dozens of essays making the same observations. Look at your analysis. Does it stop at themes? If so, this blog is for you. Themes are broad ideas that exist within every text. The problem isn't the th