How can I learn to plan faster?

[jujukerry]

Hi, this year I'm planning to write on 'Jane Eyre' and the 'Seamus Heaney' poetry, and I feel good about the poems because I feel like it's super easy to work closely with the language for poetry, and planning is pretty fast. With 'Jane Eyre' I'm struggling a little. The passages are much longer and I feel I spend waaaayyy too long reading, drawing links between the passages and ordering my ideas that I don't have enough time to finish an essay and if I were to cut myself off at an hour it would be much too short and lacking the detail required for a good response. Does anyone have any advice for quickly planning for longer passages?

[Maz]

Hi, this year I'm planning to write on 'Jane Eyre' and the 'Seamus Heaney' poetry, and I feel good about the poems because I feel like it's super easy to work closely with the language for poetry, and planning is pretty fast. With 'Jane Eyre' I'm struggling a little. The passages are much longer and I feel I spend waaaayyy too long reading, drawing links between the passages and ordering my ideas that I don't have enough time to finish an essay and if I were to cut myself off at an hour it would be much too short and lacking the detail required for a good response. Does anyone have any advice for quickly planning for longer passages?

Practice. Literally just get multiple passages from any text you can find (past papers) and time yourself and practice. Also, familiarise yourself with your texts really well. It doesn't matter if you take a huge time studying the passage...You will just have to write fast (practice for that too).

[tim.wells]

Hi, this year I'm planning to write on 'Jane Eyre' and the 'Seamus Heaney' poetry, and I feel good about the poems because I feel like it's super easy to work closely with the language for poetry, and planning is pretty fast. With 'Jane Eyre' I'm struggling a little. The passages are much longer and I feel I spend waaaayyy too long reading, drawing links between the passages and ordering my ideas that I don't have enough time to finish an essay and if I were to cut myself off at an hour it would be much too short and lacking the detail required for a good response. Does anyone have any advice for quickly planning for longer passages?

I would recommend practising in the same sort of setting that you will be sitting the exam in, i.e. you have 15 minutes reading time. You should get to a stage [once you feel a little more confident with planning for Jane Eyre] where you can sit down with a practise exam and spend 15 minutes mentally planning for both of your texts.

I would recommend spending no more than 5 minutes on planning for poetry because, as you said, you find it easier. Then spend the remaining 10 minutes planning your response for Jane Eyre in your head. This is a hard process and everyone struggles with it, but you simply must learn how to do it because it's a necessity in the exam. Then once your timer goes off, spend 5 minutes writing out as detailed a plan as you can for Jane Eyre. I recommend dedicating a few hours each week to this process up until exams.

Another thing to practise would be to write an essay for Jane Eyre without planning at all.The first few times you try this don't time yourself, but once you can write an essay without a plan, you will be less reliant on it and are likely to spend less time planning during the exam and more time writing!