* the activity of taking care of, controlling, or moving animals, especially large animals such as cows or horses1
Sometimes an exam question just needs taming!
Today’s mission is to show you how.
You’ve probably had this nightmare during a mock or whilst doing a past paper. The question’s just too broad; or you have too much to say in the time allowed; or there are gaps in your knowledge which mean you were hoping for a ‘kind’ paper …
G’s exam rule #01:
Mutter a grumpy ‘thanks for that’, [insert exam board of your choice]. Yes … I always do this.
After that? What do we do next?
We get to work.
G’s exam rule #02 kicks in:
You can say (pretty much) what you want – as long as you can back it up.
It’s even more important at A-Level, where AO1 asks for “informed, personal and creative responses,”
It’s YOUR answer. The emphasis is on you. Which means that with a little thought, and some practice, you can dictate the terms that your essay should be marked on.
So we ‘wrangle’ the question according to what we intend to say.
Your introduction is the place to do this.
Let’s look at these examples.2
All are based on a past paper about John Donne, but if you look carefully, you’ll see how this can apply to any essay, any text, and any exam board.
‘With close reference to relevant contexts, consider some of the ways in which Donne writes about close relationships.’ [45]
WJEC Unit 3, Pre-19th Century Poetry A2:
AO1 (10) – AO2 (5) – AO3 (30) [AO = Assessment Objective]
Colour Coding?
AO1 – AO2 – AO3 – AO4 – AO5
Student A
wants to write about the Holy Sonnets today. Those were the poems which ‘spoke’ to them:
Although Donne is often praised as a ‘love poet’, it is notable how few of his poems can be plausibly connected to his wife, Ann More – especially when we consider that he was imprisoned as a consequence of his clandestine marriage to her, and that she bore him twelve children in sixteen years before her early death. Arguably, Donne’s closest relationship of all was with God; analysing his Holy Sonnet sequence perhaps shows him at his most intimate and honest.
Student B
was desperate a question about the ‘earlier’ poems would come up:
Despite a 16-year marriage originally transacted in secret, a dozen children, and the trauma of his wife’s early death, this ‘middle’ period of his life and career seems underrepresented in Donne’s works. If we want to examine how he wrote about close relationships, some of his ‘earlier’ works are not just suggestive of an adventurous love-life before he met Anne More, but could also reflect the cut-and-thrust of the close relationships of his circle of friends (who were, after all, the intended audience for these works), and wider social attitudes towards love, sex, and romance.
Student C
feels their safest bet is to cover all the bases:
If we assume most of Donne’s work to be at least linked to his life and experiences (if not completely autobiographical) we might look at how we writes about three different types of close relationship. Firstly, there are the close physical relationships suggestive of his early career as an accomplished single man in London. Then – and perhaps this coincides with his meeting Anne More around 1597 and marrying her in 1601 – there is the poetry which rejects sex in favour of a union of two souls. Finally, the Holy Sonnets might give us insight into his final close relationship: with God as an Anglican priest.
Important Notes:
First, on ’wrangling’
1 – none of these is noticeably better than the others, or would necessarily lead to a higher mark.
2 – each example succeeds because it justifies a student’s selection of poems with a strong signal that the student understands that this is a context-led essay. They send the message, almost before the examiner really begins paying attention, that this student knows what they are doing.
3 – wrangling the question in this case means that they are all setting out their approach and giving plausible reasons for that decision.
Other notes
4 – if you are studying Donne my advice is to get something into your essay as soon as you can to acknowledge that only a handful of poems were published during his lifetime, so establishing a chronology is about making educated guesses.
5 – as a general rule, your introduction is never the place to do any AO2, regardless of the mix of AOs you’re being tested on. None of these fall into that trap.
6 – the examples do not, however, answer the question. If we use the analogy of a train journey, what they do is signal the intended destination (your fully-formed opinion at the end), and the stations (poems) you will be stopping at along the way.
You must come to a decision at the end of your essay.
Here’s an example conclusion
based on Student B’s approach to the question. Again, note the colour-coding:
Ultimately, the Holy Sonnets show us an uncomfortable power imbalance in Donne’s closest relationship. Donne’s almost Puritanical humility might jar in more modern, secular settings. However in the context of his life, the times, and with the additional recognition that the poems are by nature private and intimate, we might conclude that this closest of all relationships was one in which Donne felt wholly unworthy. At the same time he seems to have sincerely believed in God’s capacity to save him.
Useful Links / Further Reading
• How to … write an Introduction (with GCSE / A-Level examples)
• How to … write a Conclusion (with GCSE / A-Level examples)
Is a link broken? Does it lead somewhere you didn’t expect?
About TUITION IN PRACTICE
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