English Literature 5110 考試技巧

常見錯誤

1. 1high涉及分數: 8Assessment Unit A2 1: Shakespearean Genres

   Shakespeare essays spend most of their time on the printed extract and treat the rest of the play as an afterthought, or the reverse, breaking the rubric's equal split between the two.

   如何避免: Plan your 90 minutes so roughly half goes to close analysis of the extract and half to connecting it with the wider play. Check your own timing against this split before you start writing.
2. 2high涉及分數: 10Assessment Unit A2 1: Shakespearean Genres

   Shakespeare answers retell the plot of the extract instead of discussing dramatic methods such as verse form, rhetoric, dramatic irony and staging, which caps the response at 30 out of 50.

   如何避免: For every point you make, name the specific dramatic technique behind it and explain what it does, rather than describing what a character says or does.
3. 3medium涉及分數: 4Genre context (AO3) in A2 1

   Context in the Shakespeare answer is written as generic Elizabethan or Jacobean background facts, rather than genre knowledge, tragedy, comedy, problem play, romance, applied to the specific scene.

   如何避免: Name the play's genre early and use it to explain how a specific scene works within or against that genre's conventions, instead of listing historical facts that never touch the text.
4. 4high涉及分數: 5AO5: engaging with the stimulus statement

   Essays across both papers agree wholly and immediately with the question's stimulus statement, especially one containing an absolute word such as 'entirely', 'impossible' or 'throughout'.

   如何避免: Address the absolute word directly. Show where the statement holds and where it strains, and reach your own qualified judgement rather than a flat agreement.
5. 5medium涉及分數: 3Textual reference under closed-book conditions

   Closed-book conditions are treated as licence to quote loosely or paraphrase vaguely, when examiners expect short, precise, syntactically integrated references to the text.

   如何避免: Practise recalling short, exact phrases rather than whole passages, and build them into your own sentences rather than dropping them in unexplained.
6. 6medium涉及分數: 4AO4: connections within and between poems

   In A2 2 Section A, the self-selected companion poem or extract receives only a few sentences of analysis compared to the main text, breaking the balance AO4 rewards.

   如何避免: Give the companion poem or extract genuinely equal analytical space, planning both together before you write rather than adding the second one on at the end.
7. 7medium涉及分數: 3Section B: Unseen Poetry

   Unseen poetry answers in Section B bring in invented or guessed historical or biographical context, even though Section B covers AO1, AO2 and AO5, not AO3.

   如何避免: Leave context out of Section B entirely. Spend that time instead on close analysis of form, structure, language and tone, and on exploring more than one possible reading of the poem.
8. 8medium涉及分數: 3Reading the question closely

   Essays fail to address every term in the question's stimulus statement, picking up on one phrase while ignoring an equally important absolute term elsewhere in the same sentence.

   如何避免: Underline every significant term in the statement before you plan, and make sure your essay returns to each one, not just the term that is easiest to write about.