Transcription
This is Michael. Michael has just received his English mark back for a recent essay that he did. He listened in class, did all the homework, put in hours of effort, yet he's still confused why he hasn't improved his results.
So this was me in middle school. 39/48 was roughly the mark that I got for one of my English essays. But this was the lowest mark that I have ever gotten for any subject at this time. And just as some background, during this time I went to a tutoring place to hopefully improve in English, and we had to write an essay a week. But even after a year and a half of tutoring, I was still getting mostly Cs, with the occasional dip or pick here and there. I would say this was mostly my average for the entire middle school.
I remember at one stage I just got annoyed that I couldn't improve after all this time and tutoring, and so I just stopped. I decided to set out and find more efficient ways to go about English, because I felt like there were better ways to go about it than just churning out essays every single week.
Looking back now, it turns out that my previous approach was not effective at all. Because just one year later, in Year 9, with a fraction of the amount of essays that I did, I only lost one mark the entire year for English. And so that was obviously unbelievable at that time. Carrying that momentum and that motivation forward, in addition to hours upon hours of work, this was how I was fortunate enough to receive a Premier's Award for English, with an exam score of 59 out of 60.
This video is going to cover exactly what I did to turn the tides. First thing is mindset, and I wanted to touch on this quickly because no one is born with the raw talent to easily skim through Shakespeare, or the natural ability to analyze random pictures of watermelons, as you saw earlier. I was averaging around Cs for most of my time in middle school, and it was only when I started to change my approach did my results start to improve. And most of my improvement occurred within one year, and that was without any clear sense of direction and lots of trial and error. So I hope that for you watching this, it takes much less time. Just know, with any sort of improvement, it does take a lot of hard work, so I'm not going to sugarcoat that. However, just because the process isn't easy doesn't mean it has to be complicated. So, from my personal experiences at least, the path was quite straightforward.
So now let's go through the logistics about English and what specific things I did to improve. So for English, the most important essay to know how to write are analytical essays. And this is basically where you analyze what the author or the writer has said. For those doing VCE English, the three essays on the final year exam—so comparative text response, text response, and argument analysis—are all examples of analytical essays. And the thing about these essays is that they all share the exact same structure. So let's go through this right now.
So overall, we have an intro, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. So hopefully we are familiar with that. But all body paragraphs also have the same structure, more or less. And you might have been taught the TEAL structure: topic sentence, evidence, explain, and link. Usually you have three to four sets of these—evidence or explain—per paragraph, like so. And I agree with having a topic sentence and a link, but I found that the two Es—so evidence and explanation—was just too broad, and I replaced it with what I believe to be the three most important words: so, how, what, why. This means each body paragraph looks like this: a topic sentence, three to four "how, what, why"s, and a link.
So let's go through what each part means. So first, I pick an idea that I want to express. This is the "what"—so what idea are you trying to say? So for this paragraph, let's come up with an idea. For example, your "what" might be: "The author argues that writing essays is difficult at first, but then it gets easier." Next, find a quote or evidence from your text. This is the "how"—so how is this idea shown? For example, this can be seen through the figurative language that "writing essays is like rolling a boulder up a mountain and then watching it roll down." And finally, why is this idea important? This is the "why," and this is where you analyze. A neat trick to make sure you're analyzing and not summarizing is to begin your sentence with "this highlights." For example, "This highlights that if we overcome the obstacles during the mountain climb, it is possible to develop the momentum needed to write better and therefore achieve higher results." So that is the "how, what, why" structure.
To recap, for every single essay we have: intro, three body paragraphs, conclusion. And each body paragraph is split like this. Now there might be some more nuances depending on what essay you're writing, but that's why I have a dedicated video for each of the three essays that you're doing on the end of your exam, and I'll be linked in the description below.
Following from that structure, if you look at my essays, they look something like this. So the text isn't important, but as you can see the intro and conclusion look normal, but my body paragraphs are split like this. And I always split my body paragraphs when I'm writing my draft essays, and then I combine them when I'm doing a test or an exam. And this is because I wanted to clearly see what my topic sentence was, what my three "how, what, why" blocks were, and what my link was. Another option is to color-code your essay, but either way, the point that I'm trying to get here is that you want to visually be able to see how your essay is split up, because this helps identify any areas that you don't need. For example, if you look at this body paragraph, if something isn't a topic sentence, link, or a "how" or "why," then it doesn't need to be in your essay. And this is how you can become concise in your writing, as I mentioned in this video linked above. Great writers always learned from previous writers.
So initially, how I improved from getting Cs in English was a good friend of mine—his name was John, that's his real name—he was at the top of the class, and he let me look at one of his sample essays that he wrote for one of our English assessments. So what I did was I analyzed every single sentence, word that he wrote, as well as analyze what his thought process was like. And in the next essay that I wrote for a different topic, I would try and mimic his writing style—so similar phrases, logic, etc.—and that's how I went from a C to a B+. And even though that wasn't the top of the class, I knew that I was on the right track. And I quickly realized the power of sample essays. You probably don't need me explaining this, but essentially I would analyze the essays that I had for good phrases, their writing habits, etc. And so my document ended up looking like this.
So if you have any questions about how much vocab should I have, or sentence structure, or grammar, then I would always look at a sample essay first, because that will show you what requirements you need. And if you're wondering about how to get these sample essays, this is where this channel comes in. So in the description below you will find links to the essays that I wrote for each section of the exam that scored quite highly, and these are completely for free. And moreover, you can also try searching for them online, since there's lots of forums that offer them for free, such as Ato notes. And I also bought these sample essays from past students as well, and it was probably one of the better investments that I made.
My first draft essay for a topic always took the most amount of time. So let's just use comparative text response as an example. It took me four to five weeks to finish my first draft. And this wasn't because I spent 10 hours writing each day. Instead, initially I would first do a basic plan, and then over a couple of days—maybe during class—I would continue adding ideas, quotes into this essay. And then I would spend time joining the ideas and quotes into what looked like a full piece of writing. And then finally, I spent time refining—so swapping out points that didn't fit right, as well as getting feedback. And this sometimes was just 10 minutes a day. For example, on the train to school, I would sometimes look at my essay; I would read it, and if something needed to change, I would quickly make note of it on my phone. And then after I thought my essay was perfect, I would give it to my teacher for feedback, who would often point out all these flaws. So basically, I take that in and I repeat the process until both of us think that the essay is of a high quality. The purpose of this is to come up with a really good essay—so first, you know what the requirements are and how to write a good essay, but also you can start to reuse some of the good phrases or good sentence stems that you have used in the past. And this is how you go from relying on sample essays to writing sample essays yourself.
Now, a highly debatable area: should you memorize essays or parts of essays? And I'll go through exactly what I did, but just know that this doesn't mean it's the only correct way to approach it. However, it was an approach that I found quite helpful. So basically what I did was I would memorize parts of an essay, and more specifically, here are the parts that I would memorize: so any good phrases, sentence stems, definitely, but most importantly, quotes and analysis. And the reason for this is because you can't memorize things like the contention or topic or linking sentences, since that is highly dependent on what topic you have. However, you can look at the major themes of a text, and under each theme, memorize key quotes plus analysis, which you can apply to a variety of topics. So I don't just memorize quotes; I would memorize quotes and how I would analyze them. And I felt like this helped me remember my quotes better because I knew what they meant and how they fit into an essay. Another way to think about it is, rather than just memorizing the quote—which is the "how"—we are memorizing the "how, what, and why." Does this have to be word-for-word? Definitely not. There's always going to be some changes when we tailor our analysis to a topic, but the changes will be minor if we already have a backbone in place.
Final tip: try to use quotes that are quite versatile and can be used in a lot of topics. And again, you can look at sample essays for direction here. But for me, I didn't have a lot of quotes for one text; I had around 20 to 30 different quotes and analysis, and I felt like that was plenty enough for all the essay topics that I did.
To summarize my overall process and the actionable steps that I took, here it is: So first, I would focus on one essay until it's near perfect, using online resources, sample essays, feedback, and the "how, what, why" structure. So basically here we are focusing on one essay in lots of depth. Then I would draft plans for a variety of topics and come up with the key quotes and analysis that I would use. Here we are focusing on a variety of topics but in less depth. So steps one and step two complement each other quite well. Third, I would make a list of the quotes that you used and the analysis, and I would memorize and practice applying these. Again, memorize doesn't mean you have to memorize word-for-word; as long as the basic idea is there, then it's fine. And just as a note, when I moved on to exam revision, I would practice writing essays under time conditions, then using feedback and other resources, improve that essay afterwards and repeat.
So this has been my journey in VCE English, and I hope that you're able to take away a thing or two. And just remember that again, these are my personal experiences, so there's no one right answer for English, only a better one, and that's always up to you to decide. Take care.