What intermediate steps should I take between reading the texts and writing essays?
Build your own interpretation of the textA lot of people seem to overlook the "response" part of text response. It is all too easy for people to view the task as simply regurgitating essays using ideas given by their teachers or those they stole from text guides. You should try to avoid this trap by building your own opinions and attitudes towards what happened in the text. This is particularly important for books where you're dealing with serious or typically taboo themes. In all honesty, this is something you may do subconsciously to a very great extent and you would have likely also done it while reading the text. Either way, by building your own interpretation, you begin forming ideas and conceptions about how the piece works as a whole to achieve a particularly meaning or meanings.
So why is this so important? Well, above all, by building your
own interpretation of the text, you will ensure that the essays you write in the future will have coherent and consistent arguments. If you were to simply amalgamate a bunch of different ideas that your teacher or classmates have mentioned in passing, your response may seem like it lacks consistency in interpretation. On the other hand, if you have your own opinion on which characters are "good" or "bad" (for example), you can begin to formulate your own answers as to what views and values you think the author or director holds.
Construct a quote bankThis will be a massive help for you when writing essays. It goes without saying that you won't be able to write a great English Text Response without having evidence to back up your points. As a result, at one stage or another you'll need to learn quotes that you can use to support the ideas that you will argue for. Similarly, if you're doing a movie such as
Mabo, you should gain an understanding of the filmic devices that occur, when they occur, and why they are used. This can go hand in hand with the next step (sorting quotes by themes), or you could even organise it by character or, at the very least, chronologically.
Establish the main themes of the textOut of all of the prompts that can appear for your text, you'll more often than not be able to link the question with one or two major themes of the text. If you've already gone through all of these yourself, you're saving yourself a lot of trouble trying to decipher essay questions in the future. Once you've done this, you can ask yourself "what is the author of the text trying to say about theme xyz?"
Practise planning essaysGrab a huge list of potential questions that you can get for your TR and go through them one-by-one. I liked to highlight the ones I thought were simple in one colour and the more difficult ones in another. Try to pick some pieces of evidence that you could use for each question/prompt so that you will quickly be able to recall quotes etc. when you're doing the real task. Moreover, it's important you understand which questions you find difficult because it's likely that they will all share a common thread. If you can identify where the problem lies when you're doing prompts, you'll be happy that you didn't have to write out 5-6 paragraphs just to understand you don't get what's going in with a particular character.