Vitamins and revision

Nothing interesting is going to happen from now on, I’m afraid, people! Today we went over in some detail the 2008 Close Reading. Please do/finish this for homework.

We also considered the language on the label of a Vitamin Water bottle. Remember to practise your analytical skills as you live your life between now and May 15. Read adverts, labels, leaflets, newspaper articles – anything – and look at the sentence structure, word choice and so on.

Next week we shall be looking at actual students’ essays and the SQA’s marks for them, and then doing a timed essay on literature. So come prepared! No more spoon-feeding…

Do some revision. Write some essays. Do not have any fun.

Prelim paper 2

Not much to write on the blog this week, since the time was spent on paper 2 of the prelim. Hope you found it reasonably satisfactory. The questios were all actual exam ones from different years, though some of them were slightly tailored to match the SQA’s currently favoured wording. Remember, however, that in the actual exam in May, none of us knows what the questions will be, so there’s no guarantee that there will be a particularly suitable question for any of your texts. In fact I’d be very surprised if there weren’t reasonable ones for “A Patchwork Planet” and “A View from the Bridge” but... who really knows?. Fingers crossed.

As far as poetry is concerned, this is far less predictable. For any one poem – or even for any three or four – all we can say is that there might be a suitable question or there might not. Most people find poetry questions more straightforward than drama or prose ones, simply because there’s far less of the problem of which bits of the text to select for highlighting in your essay. However, because the poetry questions are usually much specific, you shouldn’t rely on being able to use one of them. Nevertheless I would try to have a few up your sleeve for use if the opportunity arises.

No homework. This will start again next week. From now on, we’ll be back to practising Close Readings and literature essays.

By the way, this blog is regularly visited by people in Brighton, Sheffield and Belfast. Can't imagine why, really - but hello to you.