How many pages?

[shooterblitz]

I've written a fair few practice text response essays just in the past 2 days, and I've gone to a maximum of 3 and a bit pages.

What is the recommended minimum and maximum length of a text response you should aim for in the exam?

As well as the length for the language analysis?

[DetteAmelie]

Don't go by page numbers. As long as you've addressed the prompt in a comprehensive and coherent manner then the length shouldn't matter. The same thing applies with language analysis.

Are you handwriting your essays or typing them out? If you're doing the latter then unless you're using font size 18-20, 3+ pages seems a bit lengthy and I don't believe you'd be able to replicate that amount of writing in the exam given the time constraints.

[shooterblitz]

Don't go by page numbers. As long as you've addressed the prompt in a comprehensive and coherent manner then the length shouldn't matter. The same thing applies with language analysis.

Are you handwriting your essays or typing them out? If you're doing the latter then unless you're using font size 18-20, 3+ pages seems a bit lengthy and I don't believe you'd be able to replicate that amount of writing in the exam given the time constraints.

Well I'm handwriting the essays, then typing them up quickly so I can get them marked off my teacher via e-mail, and possibly send some through to ex-students on here.

[EspoirTron]

Hey!

I don't think page numbers should be an indicative of quality of the standard of a piece. As Floraison has mentioned, as long as you explore the prompt in great depth there is no reason why you cannot access full marks. Don't think page numbers, just ask yourself if you're happy with the piece and whether or not you believe that it has addressed all the necessary criteria.
By the way, don't let page numbers tell you how good your work is, you could be fitting ten words per line, so three pages would be a substantial amount!

[BasicAcid]

I have never seen a piece that only has two pages or less (handwritten) receive a score above 7.
All the sample "high scoring" essays I've seen on the internet and the ones my teacher has given us written by past and current students all have around 3 pages of writing.

[DetteAmelie]

I have never seen a piece that only has two pages or less (handwritten) receive a score above 7.
All the sample "high scoring" essays I've seen on the internet and the ones my teacher has given us written by past and current students all have around 3 pages of writing.

We're getting too bogged down with irrelevant technicalities. You can't really measure the quality of the piece with quantity of pages, for obvious reasons I won't bother explaining. But if you must know, my English teacher (yes, he use to be an examiner) gave my class a two page sample essay (the handwriting was quite large) and scored the student a 25/30.

OP, page numbers are irrelevant. When you're writing an essay, the first thing that pops into your head shouldn't be "oh okay, I've got to write at least 3 pages and then I'm set," you should be focusing on divulging your ideas and presenting them in best possible way.
There is no number of pages that needs to be satisfied to produce a high scoring essay because I believe that sometimes the key to writing a great essay is brevity.

[werdna]

I personally think that 3+ pages in handwriting will set you up nicely.

It would be a good idea for you to print out heaps of copies of the exam lined paper available on the VCAA website, and practise writing on this. As a rough guide, 1000+ words would be a good word count to work towards. This could be 3 pages, 3.5 pages or whatever in your handwriting.

[brenden]

I honestly don't think it's a productive gauge. A friend of mine got 44 and I think his essays were two pages a piece. He had neat as fuck cursive handwriting and got a shit load on each page. Conversely, I wrote like 15 pages in total for my exam but the total word count would have been less that 2,700.
If you're typing up your essays, stop at the end of every page and see how many words your getting down. 1000+ words I think is a very suitable aim for high-scores.
There's no real 'max-length' you should cap yourself at. Let the timing and what you want to say be your cap.

[Stick]

Don't go by word length at all. At the start of the year, I went into English under the premise that I should be writing a whole heap of pages so that I went into a whole lot of detail. While I generally found enough to talk about without waffling on, most of the teachers I showed (a couple of which are assessors) would say something along the lines of "this is great, but you'd only need two thirds of this to get full marks, and this sort of length really isn't feasible in the SAC/exam." So for a good part of this year I've actually spent more time reducing my word count back to what it used to be last year, rather than adding onto it. I've been told by a few reputable teachers that 4-6 pages in handwriting is about perfect for VCE English.

[shooterblitz]

Thanks so much for the feedback everyone. Appreciate the time you all took to respond. Will put these into consideration and try follow the advice!

[KingofDerp]

got A+ last year for lit, bit different but still essays marked by english assesors. and only did 3-2.5 pages per essay D: u should be right
kid in my class who i thought was a genius ripped into a second booklet at over 6 pages, and he did worse. so yeh quality over quantity, dont be stressed

[aprilda]

It's quality over quantity! so don't fret : )

[Shenz0r]

I think I wrote 3-4 pages per essay. But of course, don't just fill in pages with ramble.