Cort,
It's by no means too late to try and fix these problems; in fact it's not until this stage of the year, once you're through learning all the content, that a lot of people finally get the change to fine-tune their approach. I'd say as a starting point, if you're making a claim in your abstract discussion, let's say, 'Conflict isn't always obvious to us, sometimes it's hidden under the surface and manifests itself in the form of unspoken tension or reticence.' Your first step should be to ask yourself 'how do I know?' Eventually this should force you into coming up with some sort of evidence-based justification, ie. 'well, you can see this sort of tension when a relationship deteriorates; the couple hit that point where they realise they have little to say to one another, and from there a chasm begins to form between them, gradually being filled up with all the little 'niggles' they have about one another, but never quite boiling over onto the surface. Such was the case on the most recent season of
The Bachelor in which a love that was meant to last forever between the contestant and the 'winner' only ended up lasting mere weeks.'
An interesting article by the Guardian discussed this in relation to our current reality TV landscapes.
No matter how silly or mundane you think your evidence might be, there's always a way to link it in. Keep questioning yourself, and you should be able to come up with some options.
Alternatively you could go about this from the opposite end and just look through random wikipedia/news articles until something piques your interest. Start with your set text and work out; the context books and films were chosen because of their relation to bigger ideas, so see if you can use them to propel you into other territory.
Bestie:
Study score predictions really aren't my forte;
there's a thread for that. It's so dependent on rankings anyway, and you can always perform better in the exam than you do on practice pieces. I'm really not even comfortable predicting because I have very little understanding of the system, and I wouldn't want to shatter your self-esteem, or give you a false sense of security.
If you're asking what I got score-wise, I couldn't tell you. Our school was notoriously secretive, we only ever got rough bandwidths (eg. Very High, High, Medium etc.) If you're asking study-wise what it took, I put all thoughts of numerical scores out of my head and concentrated on what I knew I had control over
Random_Acts_of_Kindness:
Why thank you, kind ma'am; glad to be of use. Best of luck for your exams
Valyria:
Vocab is a good place to start; are you not discussing other tones because they're not there, or because you don't have the language to deal with them? Because for most texts (certainly the VCAA/Practice Papers) there will definitely be some key tones to analyse. The vocab sheet on the first page on this thread has a tone sheet attached if you need a place to start. It becomes a lot easier to deal with tonal shifts when you can recognise and categorise more than one :p
Yes, you can deal with how this influences the readers too, but don't overdo it. Likewise with the above post regarding how often to mention tone, you don't want to underdo it and not receive credit, but you also don't want to be cramming adverbs like 'emphatically' and 'aggressively' into every second sentence. Make the occasional passing reference, then maybe analyse it once or twice if there's a major emphasis or a clearly provocative shift.
magneto:
As in... having a plan b for not getting the SS/ATAR you want? I suppose you could say something about how some things are just out of your control, and you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, only to be left with a sub-par score, for whatever reason, and have nowhere to go. Having a backup plan isn't defeatist, it's just pragmatic forward planning.
I assume that's what you're talking about, correct me if I'm wrong?
katiesaliba:
A little of both. If you are writing times pieces, there's no sense just stopping when you get to one hour, so continue writing and just use a different colour, or mark the place on the page that you're going overtime for. That should help you work out where you need to cut down (eg. 30 minutes spend on body paragraph 2, so not enough time for a conclusion --> start making that shorter, or break it in two.)
On the other hand, and this is quite unique to context, often practice paragraphs are sufficient. If you're trialing new ideas and examples, implementing them should only take a paragraph or two, so perhaps try some untimed versions and then see if you can reapply/rework those them into a different prompt under time later.
Also, try and be specific with your self-criticism. 'Struggling with ideas' doesn't really help you much; do you find it tricky to think of points to discuss, or arguments that you can base around these? Or is it a problem with using examples and evidence? Or is it a general problem with articulation - 'knowing what to say but not how to say it'? It's great that you're evaluating your capabilities and weaknesses, but the more closely you target the latter, the easier it will be to fix your mistakes