How can I stop summarising and narrating?

[Genshai]

Hey guys

I'm currently studying China and Russia in unit 3/4 revs. I'm good with the content, but I keep losing marks for summarising/narrating (ie, I'm not concise and don't 'analyse' enough). For example, in the ten-mark responses, I have no problem with understanding the content or the sources (like, I understand what they're asking) it's just that I don't know how to cut down my responses. This is my last hurdle... I'm average an B+/A in my practice questions, and this is the last step before consistently writing better responses.

Do you have any advice for writing a concise answer?

Thank you in advance !

[Amyy5412]

Hi Genshai,
Dont know if this helps, but I had a similar problem where my teacher was always telling me I added too much 'filler'.
A way she explained to structure my responses really helped.
And that was to make sure all my sentences were based around showing cause and effect, rather than just describing explaining events.
So, my writing had to be something like: '__ happened, which caused __ because of __.' as often as possible, which prevented me from going into detail explanations about the events themselves instead, which keep on diverting me. And then you'd back up that argument with a quote/date etc.
It may not work for you, but I just found that forcing as much of writing as possible to be about analysing connections rather than explaining helped me get better marks.
ATB

[K888]

Throwback to 5 years ago when I did Revs, I originally struggled with this. It just took practice of completely cutting out summarising and narrative and only talking about effects and consequences. So I would mention the name of an event and the date, but completely cut out summarising what happened in the event. I also agree with what Amyy5412 said - they've presented a really nice structure.

I assume it hasn't changed much since I did Revs - you get the marks for discussing the effects and consequences of events and not for being able to talk about them. It's assumed that the examiners know about the events I wish there was a short cut but I think it'll just be a matter of constantly reminding yourself to cut out the story and practising this new structure of writing a lot!

[The Cat In The Hat]

I started out originally, in learning how to do it in the first place, just writing down [event] -> [next event] -> [next event, etc.] -> [consequence]. I then just wrote that out in full.
It helped me to get my head around it, so now I can do it ok without that. But I found it helpful. You might too. It also took barely any time and gave me a good structure to work off already.