prepared essays for English exam

[TheEagle]

Hey AN

I am sitting the English exam next year and have always thought about memorising a few essays just in case I guess the topic, or worse case, I try and 'blend' or 'fit' the topic into my prepared essays. Has anyone done this?

[Matthew_Whelan]

The examination reports tend to advise against this (unless you get lucky and guess the prompts exactly) and contrived responses do stand out as they usually don't answer the prompt correctly. It is definitely worth it to practise several essays but don't rely on a memorised response as VCAA tend to stress the importance of "relevance to the prompt".

[Sine]

Hey AN

I am sitting the English exam next year and have always thought about memorising a few essays just in case I guess the topic, or worse case, I try and 'blend' or 'fit' the topic into my prepared essays. Has anyone done this?

Yeah, I would definitely not recommend someone to memorise whole essays for your exam but I do think it is a useful technique to have a good understanding/somewhat memorise paragraphs that can be used. Once you start writing essays you will see certain themes, characters tend to come up quite a bit so certain paragraphs can be quite useful and be used across many essays.

EDIT: also if you do learn paragraphs (or essays if you choose to - although I wouldn't recommend it) it is important that they are your own original work since you shouldn't be plagiarising anyone else's stuff.

[Just another student]

Yeah, I would definitely not recommend someone to memorise whole essays for your exam but I do think it is a useful technique to have a good understanding/somewhat memorise paragraphs that can be used. Once you start writing essays you will see certain themes, characters tend to come up quite a bit so certain paragraphs can be quite useful and be used across many essays.

Would you recommend memorizing like 10-12 paragraphs and adjusting them to the prompt for the real essay? It would be basically like memorizing 20+ quotes with analysis and with topic sentences i guess. I'm asking this because for comparative section, for most of the prompts I've noticed that you can kind of recycle ideas and quotes.
Thanks

EDIT: also if you do learn paragraphs (or essays if you choose to - although I wouldn't recommend it) it is important that they are your own original work since you shouldn't be plagiarising anyone else's stuff.