English Advanced Question Thread

[dancing phalanges]

Hey Elyse,
This is slightly off topic but how do you bounce back from receiving disappointing assessment marks for AOS, especially if you are aiming towards a high atar?
Thanks

Hey, just giving my two cents, as hard as it may be, the best thing to do is look past it and work hard to make sure you make up for the bad mark in your future assessments. If you have time definitely look at how you can improve for next time but focus more on how you can use that bad mark to motivate you to for the rest of the year! Hope that helped

[Mada438]

Hey Elyse,
This is slightly off topic but how do you bounce back from receiving disappointing assessment marks for AOS, especially if you are aiming towards a high atar?
Thanks

Hey, just giving my two cents, as hard as it may be, the best thing to do is look past it and work hard to make sure you make up for the bad mark in your future assessments. If you have time definitely look at how you can improve for next time but focus more on how you can use that bad mark to motivate you to for the rest of the year! Hope that helped

Agree with dancing phalanges here. Make sure you work out what exactly caused you to get bad marks, and work to improve that. Was it time management? Practice under timed conditions Was it that you struggled to remember quotes and parts of your story? Then start revising and memorising earlier. Was it that you unprepared? Start studying and preparing earlier.
Make sure whatever made you get bad marks is your focus for improvement. Work on it, and you should get better marks.
Also remember that in the greater scheme of things, term 1 AOS assessment marks aren't gonna mess you up heaps. This is the best time to get things wrong, because you have plenty of time to improve.
Hope this helps
Keep on grinding! 

[elysepopplewell]

Hey Elyse,
This is slightly off topic but how do you bounce back from receiving disappointing assessment marks for AOS, especially if you are aiming towards a high atar?
Thanks  

Not at all off topic! I really echo what dancing phalanges has said:

Hey, just giving my two cents, as hard as it may be, the best thing to do is look past it and work hard to make sure you make up for the bad mark in your future assessments. If you have time definitely look at how you can improve for next time but focus more on how you can use that bad mark to motivate you to for the rest of the year! Hope that helped

At the end of the day, you can't stay on the ground when you've got to get back up and running again. Take some time, and come to terms with it: What went wrong? What went right? How can you go up from here? What's the plan?

But sometimes you've just got to put it to bed and get moving on to new things if it's weighing you down. But if you can make your peace with it - then it's only upwards from here!

[Calley123]

Hey,
When writing essays, I always struggle make a link in my body paragraphs back to the thesis statement without actually repeating it word for word. Any advice?

Thanks

[elysepopplewell]

Hey,
When writing essays, I always struggle make a link in my body paragraphs back to the thesis statement without actually repeating it word for word. Any advice?

Thanks

Hey!
It might be handy to have a bank of synonyms for the key words in your thesis statements. Perhaps they won't be direct synonyms, but words that you could appropriately swap out to show the way you're looking at the ideas in new lights through the text.

Also, make sure you can switch up the syntax of the sentence. If you're sentence is anything but a simple sentence, it will have at least two "points" so to say. If you can break up those two points and flip them, or alternatively break them up completely and pair them with your topic sentence for that paragraph, you have a winner!

For example:

"Discoveries may be planned or unplanned, but they will always be intensely meaningful in surprising ways."

Where the comma is represents the split in the ideas, so whichever idea is most prominently expressed in that particular paragraph, you can capitalise on. You don't need to bring up all the ideas at once and spit it out the way it is in your introduction, but pick and choose what you want to emphasise

[Calley123]

Hey!
It might be handy to have a bank of synonyms for the key words in your thesis statements. Perhaps they won't be direct synonyms, but words that you could appropriately swap out to show the way you're looking at the ideas in new lights through the text.

Also, make sure you can switch up the syntax of the sentence. If you're sentence is anything but a simple sentence, it will have at least two "points" so to say. If you can break up those two points and flip them, or alternatively break them up completely and pair them with your topic sentence for that paragraph, you have a winner!

For example:

"Discoveries may be planned or unplanned, but they will always be intensely meaningful in surprising ways."

Where the comma is represents the split in the ideas, so whichever idea is most prominently expressed in that particular paragraph, you can capitalise on. You don't need to bring up all the ideas at once and spit it out the way it is in your introduction, but pick and choose what you want to emphasise

Thank youuuu

[theyam]

Hi guys~~
I've posted this on the marking thing, but I'd like to know opinions of other peeps too. This is my creative and at the moment its sorta just a jumble of things sorta not really meshed together. Anyways to make it more sophisticated or more discovery based perhaps? Also I know its probably more telling than showing, thanks guys~~

[Mada438]

Hi guys~~
I've posted this on the marking thing, but I'd like to know opinions of other peeps too. This is my creative and at the moment its sorta just a jumble of things sorta not really meshed together. Anyways to make it more sophisticated or more discovery based perhaps? Also I know its probably more telling than showing, thanks guys~~

I'll have a look at it probably tomorrow. In the meantime, did your teacher give you any sort of question/stimulus/specific area of discovery that you had to look at/incorporate into your story? 

[theyam]

I'll have a look at it probably tomorrow. In the meantime, did your teacher give you any sort of question/stimulus/specific area of discovery that you had to look at/incorporate into your story?

Hi Adam/Mada

I used one of the HSC stimulus from 2017. The quotes in the document~

Thank you!

[mxrylyn]

Hello, I have an essay assessment on comparative study of texts.

I am just having trouble understanding the essay question.

"How has the similar treatment in a pair of texts heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text?"

Is it possible for you to explain this question for me in simple terms so I can wrap my head around it?
I do Advanced, Ext 1 and Ext 2 English and I am top in my cohort for all of the above subjects, but i do find that I have trouble understanding some basic sentences and phrases as I am still learning English as my 2nd lauguage. Is there anything you can suggest I do to help wth this problem?

[Opengangs]

Hello, I have an essay assessment on comparative study of texts.

I am just having trouble understanding the essay question.

"How has the similar treatment in a pair of texts heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text?"

Is it possible for you to explain this question for me in simple terms so I can wrap my head around it?
I do Advanced, Ext 1 and Ext 2 English and I am top in my cohort for all of the above subjects, but i do find that I have trouble understanding some basic sentences and phrases as I am still learning English as my 2nd lauguage. Is there anything you can suggest I do to help wth this problem?

Hello, mxrylyn!

This module places its focus primarily on context. To think about this notion more deeply, I want to do an exercise with you. Think about a moment in time where you felt particularly happy, sad, angry, or frustrated. What was your attitude then? How did you react in that time? Now, think about that situation with a more recent perspective? How have things changed, and if not, in what ways are these attitudes the same?

This is what the module facilitates you to consider. To think and reflect on attitudes in relation to the context in which they are placed. Now, to directly answer the question:

We need to think deeply about the core values that are underlined in both texts, whether that be curiosity, loyalty, love, truth, or even morality, and connect these values and attitudes (such as ostracisation, oppression, etc) together in relation to their context. And if they have evolved, in what respect have they changed (heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text).

If you have any more questions, feel free to post them in this thread. Also, let me know what texts you're doing to see if we can connect these ideas together more tightly!
Good luck!

[mxrylyn]

Hello, mxrylyn!

This module places its focus primarily on context. To think about this notion more deeply, I want to do an exercise with you. Think about a moment in time where you felt particularly happy, sad, angry, or frustrated. What was your attitude then? How did you react in that time? Now, think about that situation with a more recent perspective? How have things changed, and if not, in what ways are these attitudes the same?

This is what the module facilitates you to consider. To think and reflect on attitudes in relation to the context in which they are placed. Now, to directly answer the question:

We need to think deeply about the core values that are underlined in both texts, whether that be curiosity, loyalty, love, truth, or even morality, and connect these values and attitudes (such as ostracisation, oppression, etc) together in relation to their context. And if they have evolved, in what respect have they changed (heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text).

If you have any more questions, feel free to post them in this thread. Also, let me know what texts you're doing to see if we can connect these ideas together more tightly!
Good luck!

Thank you for the reply!
I am doing 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barret Browning'. I think what connects them is the notion of idealised love.

[mxrylyn]

Hello, mxrylyn!

This module places its focus primarily on context. To think about this notion more deeply, I want to do an exercise with you. Think about a moment in time where you felt particularly happy, sad, angry, or frustrated. What was your attitude then? How did you react in that time? Now, think about that situation with a more recent perspective? How have things changed, and if not, in what ways are these attitudes the same?

This is what the module facilitates you to consider. To think and reflect on attitudes in relation to the context in which they are placed. Now, to directly answer the question:

We need to think deeply about the core values that are underlined in both texts, whether that be curiosity, loyalty, love, truth, or even morality, and connect these values and attitudes (such as ostracisation, oppression, etc) together in relation to their context. And if they have evolved, in what respect have they changed (heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text).

If you have any more questions, feel free to post them in this thread. Also, let me know what texts you're doing to see if we can connect these ideas together more tightly!
Good luck!

I also just realised that I wrote the essay question wrong.
it is "How has the treatment of similar  content in a pair of texts heightened your understanding of the values, significance and context of each text?"

[Opengangs]

Thank you for the reply!
I am doing 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barret Browning'. I think what connects them is the notion of idealised love.

Hello, mxrylyn.

Excellent start! I didn't do the texts selected, so I'll only be giving general guides rather than specific guides towards the texts. If it is the notion of idealised love you're going for, how does 'The Great Gatsby' show this idea? Whenever you're thinking about how Fitzgerald shows this idea, you need to keep in mind the values that people in his context had with idealised love (e.g. what was the reception this idea received during the time Fitzgerald wrote 'The Great Gatsby'; what events were the primary drivers in his time), and then broaden them to the contemporary audience of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems. Repeat this activity with Browning's poems, and then compare how the two values and attitudes of idealised love have changed overtime.

Remember, the context of these texts facilitates this evolutionary change of values and attitudes. Once we have this down, this allows you to have an overview of the features within Module A writing that enables you to compare the two texts in more detail. You'll have a detailed plan of the similarities and differences in relation to context, which allows you to drive your textual evidence with examples from both texts.

If you have any more questions, feel free to post them in this thread!

[fishbiscuit]

Hello!
I'm looking for a lot of band 6 responses for essays and creative writings. I've so far only found two and they are both essays, I was wondering where I could find plenty more?
I'm looking for responses that involve discovery with "The Tempest" and Module A with "The Great Gatsby" and Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Sonnets. Are there any particular sites that I can hop onto? 

Also, where can I find the markers notes or advice about responses?