Calling all high band 6ers/state rankers... (1 Viewer)

[yourbestfriend]

Hey guys,
I'm currently in year 12 and literally struggling with english advanced!
Ok that is a bit dramatic, I was second in course last year but my school is ranked quite poorly and we usually only get 0-2 band 6 in English adv each year! I literally need a 99 atar to get into law!
So here's my question to you:

• How much time should I spend on studying for english each week - All my other subjects are really content heavy, so I can't be wasting any time at all
• Did you memorise pre-prepared essays, and if so how many? I also struggle with adapting the essay to the question, so could I have some pointers on that
• I currently have just under a month left of the school holidays, and am using it primarily to get ahead on some of the content for my other subjects, but I am unsure of what to do for english? I am already starting to really my book for this term, but is there anything else I should be doing?
• What are your main tips for unseen questions?
• How many practice papers did you do for english and when? Do I start practice papers now, or should I wait closer to trials? And how many of them do I need to give to my teachers?
• Are there any resources you recommend or textbooks/study guides?

If anyone can answer all, or at least some of these questions, it will be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much guys, bos is literally a lifesaver!

 

[aaron.tfnlv]

Hello yourbestfriend, I scored 98 externally in the HSC this year as a North Sydney Boys Graduate and I think I could give you a few pointers,
- I think you should be spending a around 7 hours a week on english during these holidays first of all understanding the texts you are going to do doing next term and having a good grasp of all the concepts and themes of your text
- Within my school it was very common to memorise pre-prepared essays, however the biggest fallout in a lot of people in my cohort's marks were that they were unable to effectively adapt the question, there are a lot of ways to practice this but the best way that worked for me is consistently adapting my intro 10-20 times to 10-20 different questions and having reliable people give feedback upon your adaptations
- All you need to do for the time being is familiarise yourself with the content and book you will be reading this holidays it's not necessary to get started on writing your essay, if you feel that you weren't able to perform to the best of your abilities last term on short answer, practicing that is also always good in early preparation for trials and HSC and just to enhance your writing in general
- For term tasks I did only about 3-4 practice essays before, however for trials and HSC it definitely ramps up just because there are so many more essays to write so I did about 20 papers in preparation for each, but that was me having a very heavy focalisation on english at the time, you don't need to give them all to your teacher, peer marking or if you have a tutor to look at them is also fine
- For resources I definitely advise you to read high performing essays to get a feel of how they write however I personally didn't use and textbooks or other guides

 

[yourbestfriend]

@aaron.tfnlv omg this actually helped me so much thank you very much!!
just a quick question, what question did you use for the base essays, and how many did you write per module? like what question did you use for the common mod (since that's the only one I've done so far)?
Also, were do you recommend finding high performing essays, like just search them up online?
also in terms of my study notes for the common mod (well they are more just my techniques and analysis), my teacher told us to get 3-4 quotes per human experience (there are 3 main ones in my text - Vertigo). However, my friend who did quite well in eng adv, said to just find 9-12 generic quotes that are universal to many different themes. This really confused me, like how are the quotes meant to be universal? What does this mean, and do you recommend organising them into themes or just universal? Also how many quotes per paragraph - 3-4?
but other than that, you are actually amazing thank you!

 

[resourceful]

just chiming in, for the base essay, it’s best to find a really generic question underpinned by human experiences eg. HSC 2021
“Analyse how your prescribed text represents the ways individuals respond to the challenges
they face.”

honestly, the question that you use doesn’t matter too much as long as its not super specific because you should be aiming to adapt your essay to any generic question at least. once you’ve achieved that, you can move on to tackle more specific thematic questions (often the curveball questions).

for your paragraphs, you should try to base it around human experiences because in the end the question will always tie back to that. generally for common mod, the questions aren’t thematic. personally i just memorised about 6-7 extra quotes that I could pull out for the themes that i didn’t cover in my base essay.

there may be some quotes that could be analysed to align with multiple themes and you could definitely try find those for greater flexibility.

if you are doing 3 paragraphs, i used a minimum of 4 quotes but often high achievers will use 5-6 quotes but it depends on your writing speed and style.

as for high performing essays, there may be some online (such as on studocu) but personally i found essays from high achievers (96+ hsc mark) to be most helpful & instructive - though they’re quite hard to find online without purchasing from a graduate. if you’re interested i’m selling some text-specific eng resources from high achievers. good luck!

 

[yourbestfriend]

just chiming in, for the base essay, it’s best to find a really generic question underpinned by human experiences eg. HSC 2021
“Analyse how your prescribed text represents the ways individuals respond to the challenges
they face.”

honestly, the question that you use doesn’t matter too much as long as its not super specific because you should be aiming to adapt your essay to any generic question at least. once you’ve achieved that, you can move on to tackle more specific thematic questions (often the curveball questions).

for your paragraphs, you should try to base it around human experiences because in the end the question will always tie back to that. generally for common mod, the questions aren’t thematic. personally i just memorised about 6-7 extra quotes that I could pull out for the themes that i didn’t cover in my base essay.

there may be some quotes that could be analysed to align with multiple themes and you could definitely try find those for greater flexibility.

if you are doing 3 paragraphs, i used a minimum of 4 quotes but often high achievers will use 5-6 quotes but it depends on your writing speed and style.

as for high performing essays, there may be some online (such as on studocu) but personally i found essays from high achievers (96+ hsc mark) to be most helpful & instructive - though they’re quite hard to find online without purchasing from a graduate. if you’re interested i’m selling some text-specific eng resources from high achievers. good luck!

Yep that helps a lot! Thank you so much
english is honestly so hard for me like I don't even know what I'm writing about half the time

 

[aaron.tfnlv]

Yep, I think resourceful sums it up pretty nicely in all terms of the base essay and preparation, on top of that if your worried about resources for HSC I'm sure by the time it gets around there people within your school would've compiled some high achieving essays in a drive to share around, but for me personally I was fortunate enough that within my school one of my friends bought a large drive from the alumni and shared it around.