Answering the 3.1 questions in the External exams What have we studied that I can use?

1000 Splendid Suns. Khaled Hosseini (More to come later in the year!) What will the questions be like? They will be to what extent questions. They will make a statement a thesis statement is the flash term for it and you will have to decide to what extent you agree and/or disagree with it AND BACK YOURSELF using evidence from the text. The questions are designed to give you opportunities to show your understanding of the text(s) you have studied. Spend some time thinking about what they are asking you to do some may set a single task, some two tasks. Read carefully. You can answer by completely agreeing, completely disagreeing OR by explaining your partial agreement. Planning IS essential. You need to make sure that you cover all parts of the question. Aim for a range of kinds of evidence (and where possible, a range of sources) to give your essay a broad base and show how wide your knowledge is. Record a lot of ideas best ones first. An excellence essay is usually 600 words or so and may have 12 different examples/quotations. It s easy to cut if you have too much but a weak brainstorm may produce an essay that is too short to pass. Aim for balance, roughly the same amount of writing for each part of the topic. Introduction Write a paragraph short and snappy. The best intros are only a couple of sentences. TRUE! The first one should restate the question and your level of agreement or disagreement and the second should outline how you are going to prove this 3 points about what you are going to discuss to back yourself. Now while you should let the marker know what you are going to discuss you should NOT fall into the trap of giving any examples or explanations in this paragraph OR YOU WONT HAVE ANYTHING TO TALK ABOUT LATER DUH! Body Paragraphs The number of points you make is less important than your ability to respond critically and to support them with evidence. But 3 is plenty. Evidence is the examples, factual detail and quotations you give. When quoting, it is important to weave the quote into the flow of your answer, spelling out how it links to the other ideas in the text and the explanation you are developing. Now is a good time to remind you of one of my pet peevesNEVER SAY Mariam quotesblah blah blah Because MARIAM does not quote Mariam SAYS.. YOU are quoting. Link your paragraphs. This is important to keep the reader on track hopefully you have seen my hinges, bolts and sealers handout if not its on edmodo go check. It gives you words you can use to link, to clarify, to further your argumentetc.

Write formally. Its natural to use first person, I/me and, lets face it, the question is asking for YOUR opinion, but if you want to sound a little more sophisticated you can also mention the reader or we as readers. Call authors by their surname. e.g Hosseini not Khaled! No exceptions. Refer to them in the present tense e.g Hosseini helps us to understand this idea by. - Your paragraphs should be around 150 160 words and there should be 3 of them one for each point. The conclusion This is NOT just a restatement of your introduction. Your conclusion needs to be a solid paragraph itself. You need to relate your ideas back to the main topic. State how you showed your argument, explain what perhaps was most significant and why and sum up in at most 10 words. THIS IS WHY WRITING ESSAYS TAKES PRACTICE! Now go and do some.