Hi big question here, (year 10 student)
In school we've been doing text response essays all year as well as recently starting comparitive but I can't for some reason improve in creating more ideas or analysis in my explanation. I have a braindead teacher and I've searched and tried all the tips on this forum I can't get that writing mentality so I've decided to ask the question myself. Specifically, I find my self just reiterating the same point throughout my body paragraphs or sounding unneccesarily verbose. For example in a normal tr essay for Macbeth with a prompt asking to discuss ambition all I find myself doing is just saying- ambition is a dangerous quality capable of wracking a persons mind if not tamed>>>shakespeare exemplifies through Macbeth the unsuspecting nature of unbridled ambition, highlighting a heavy lust for power and murderous tendency as symptomatic of its atrocious ability. See how they both kinda make the same point, thats what the majority of my paragraphs end up repeating for any prompt. I want to go further than just saying ambition is dangerous and makes someone wreck havoc. Thanks and appreciate any answers to help me
I struggled with the same issue all year so, even though I wouldn't consider myself a gun at English, I'll tell you how I dealt with it.
I found that the best way to deal with these sort of problems was to have a really diverse knowledge of the text. That means, yeah still talk about the big flagship themes and characters, but don't be afraid to dedicate a paragraph to a lesser character or idea. I think that, especially in Year 12 exams, having an exam thats a bit different to the tens of thousands of others can only be a bonus that will work in your favour. To try and accomplish this, my advice would be to a) read as many high-level responses
from different schools/sources as possible, so you get ideas from multiple sources, not just the ones readily available at your school, and b) try and be a bit adventurous in your ideas.
You mentioned that you sometimes have problems due to being too "verbose". I think that a really good way to deal with this is to look back at an essay after you've read it and try to cut down as many words as possible. Try and turn a 1200 word response into a 600 word one by cutting out unnecessary fluff and replacing it with concise verbs and adjectives. In this way, you can show off your vocabulary but still be direct, but you will also discover if you have enough concepts for an entire essay. Heids wrote the best AN article ever on this topic (
https://atarnotes.com/forum/index.php?topic=162777.0) and it included a link to a really interesting essay by George Orwell (
https://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_Language-1.pdf) on the same topic. They're both definitely worth a read.
Good luck with VCE!