Hey! So short answer responses are not my forte, I prefer to memorise and refine which is an obvious problem in this section. And I was wondering what strategies everyone does? Multiple answers to this would be cool.
Like do you guys have a structure you follow, or just wing it?
Hey, not a mystery mark!
For short answer questions, I would recommend firstly
reading the question and deconstructing it. Figure out which concept/s from the rubric are you required to look out for in the unseen text. I would then
read the text with that in mind and consider what ideas about the human experience are being represented and what impact this would have on the audience. Once your reading time is up,
highlight or underline some quotes immediately so you don't forget them and annotate which techniques are being used to generate meaning. This can help you structure your responses as well; you'll have your thesis/concept statement, textual evidence, analysis and link back to audience accordingly.
As I've mentioned briefly above,
maximise your reading time with the short answers by making sure you read the question first. This way, you will be able to identify what you do need and skim read the rest of the text for quotes that might support your judgement if need be. Another tip I can give is to
memorise some techniques (they don't have to be obscure or fancy, just a good handful of ones that are common) so you can assign them a lot faster under exam conditions to the provided texts. You can use past papers to practise identifying techniques in the texts; while the syllabus is completely different, this is just good practice for you to see what kind of texts you're confident and less confident working with (for me, it was visual texts that I struggled with more!) That way, you can better prepare and cater to what gaps in your knowledge there are. Hope that helps!
Angelina