Writing prac essays

[milo12345]

hello!
Just wondering if i can get some advice: I'm feeling incredibly under-prepared for the end of year exam and while I started the year absolutely loving lit, my excitement has died down considerably. And that is mainly because i.cannot.write.essays.under.timed.conditions.. I've barely written practice essays and with the exam looming around the corner I don't know how to start. I'm doing a collection of poems as one of my exam texts and that means writing a close analysis on each poem.. except each one is taking so long to write. This is my process: researching/analysing until I have a bunch of notes and feel like I understand, organise said notes into ideas, write the essay. this takes well over two weeks (and this is an analysis on one poem, not a combination of three). I'm so slow, it puts me off writing. And reading all these amazing essays which were written in under an hour, where expression is basically on point is intimidating like...how??? how do your idea's have so much depth? How do you go about analysing your texts to glean that sort of depth? And any ideas how I can get myself to write quicker/write at all?
Thanks!

[MightyBeh]

Posted in your other thread too, but I'm posting here too.

My first advice is to find someone doing the same texts as you (assuming you've chosen your text) because then you can talk about your ideas and get some feedback. The lit board here is pretty quiet, but there's people planning to work on nearly any of the texts so you might be able to find someone here to talk with. If you happen to be doing Antony and Cleopatra, or Heart of Darkness, personally I'm happy to help.

Don't worry about timed essays right now. They're super stressful, especially if you don't really know what you want to do yet. Try timed essay plans - say 15 minutes to read a poem and plan a response that includes evidence you want to use and ideas you want to cover (and then write the essay, timing or not). Alternatively, just timed brainstorming is good too - read a short passage and map out everything you think about it in 5-10 minutes. Not everything has to be perfect, especially in the planning stage. After working out what's in a text to write about it's a lot easier to narrow it all down into an essay.

With analysing poems, given it's taking you so long: skip the research to begin with. Just read the poem and find what's interesting, boring and/or confusing to you. After that, do your research. Knowing what you don't know about your text will guide you in the direction of what you need to know, even if it's a little frustrating to do a first reading of something and not understand a word of it.

Pretty confident that most of the essays written in the exam have been planned to some extent: I don't know anyone (well, maybe one or two people) who would go in without any ideas about the text. Given we have so little time to write so much, I wouldn't be surprised if people memorised their essays.

I'm not amazing, but generally how I go about analysing texts is an initial read to work out the plot, characters, major developments, first impressions, etc.. I use a sticky note system: pink sticky notes for areas I don't understand but are probably important, orange for areas I plain don't understand, green for areas I understand and think are important, and yellow for areas that make sense but probably aren't important. Blue is for confirmed past exam passages because those are still important but are likely not very relevant to the exam because they're already been used. Coincidentally, I also have highlighters in these same colours and use the same system in my notes.

After I have all that sorted out, I do some research. Author's life, historical-context, new philosophies, general attitude of society. Pretty standard stuff.

Second reading: reorganise sticky notes so that they're more accurate based on my research and start analysing the important passages. I also do a third reading before the SAC (or exam, I guess ) if I have time, but by then I have pretty concise and accurate summaries so it's not much of a worry.