Stick, you have a mammoth amount of time and certainly haven't left it too late.
Also, I'd just like to note for you guys--- some of the best English revision is actually marking other essays. I can honestly say I made big jumps in skills after marking other essays and seeing the mistakes other people made (it made me hyper conscious of making them myself). So coming up to exam revision, if you want to get quick English revision in without even writing an essay or brainstorming, then find essays that are written on the text you're planning to write on and mark them.
(admittedly, I'm also trying to make sure all essays get marked, because I know once exam time comes they're going to be storming through the forums).
Yes, we do this in our English class. We sit around in a circle and pass our essays around. For me, it has helped in these ways:
1. It emphasises where your strengths are, and, if you're a relatively strong student, you start to understand why you get the marks you're getting. In my case, I read a lot of really good essays from various resources and I'm often left feeling as if my work is never up to scratch and that I don't deserve the marks I'm getting. Although this sounds a bit conceited, reading some of the weaker students' work is a good reminder as to what you're doing right.
2. It allows you to gain an insight into how others tackle a question. The way they do it might be completely different to how you'd ever think about it. You'll find some stuff that you could also use in your own writing.
3. By making corrections on someone else's work, you're clarifying in your mind what the indicators are for writing a good essay. If you can realise where someone has gone wrong or where they've done something correctly, you're far more likely to recognise it in your own work and make a conscious effort to address that conceptual area yourself.
4. The extra feedback you get is clearly going to be beneficial, particularly if the teacher checks the comments that people leave (my teacher does this). Someone might have a tip that no one's ever told you, not even your teacher. Getting more than one opinion on your essays is really important in VCE English - I found this one out the hard way.
So absolutely get together and share around your work. You don't have to be a genius to do it. As long as your primary focus isn't on the spelling, punctuation and grammar (these are important but everyone's going to make the odd mistake here and there, and there will always be a better way to say something, but time's limited - just get your ideas out in a cohesive manner) you're pretty much set. I warn you though, some of the handwriting that I've seen is atrocious. You might need a bit of time to extract some meaning from someone else's work.
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