Memorizing Essays?

[scanz_]

Hey everyone,

What are all of your opinions on memorizing essays for English?
And if you did memorize your essays, how effective did you find it on your marks?

Thanks in advance.

[Jakeybaby]

Hey everyone,

What are all of your opinions on memorizing essays for English?
And if you did memorize your essays, how effective did you find it on your marks?

Thanks in advance.

Check out these two articles:

This one, by Elyse, discusses how to memorize etc, http://atarnotes.com/memorising-english-essays/.

However, this one, by Jamon, discusses why memorizing essays may not be the best idea, http://atarnotes.com/memorising-essays/.

[FallingStar]

Hey everyone,

What are all of your opinions on memorizing essays for English?
And if you did memorize your essays, how effective did you find it on your marks?

Thanks in advance.

Read the articles. they are really good despite the fact that it's for HSC.

Nope: I did not memorise essays. To be honest, examiners tend to hate those memorised essays and can spot one just from reading up to your first body paragraph. They tell from the fact that it does not get to the topic, which is a big mistake to make in an English exam. You have to get to the topic as soon as possible in order to score the best marks. This means get to the topic within the first 2-3 sentences of your essay in your introduction. Even better, get to the prompt in the first sentence.

And because of that, it's risky. In my opinion, it's not worth the risk as the essay you've memorised is unlikely to be able to suit the topic of the examination, unless your topic ends up somewhat similar that you need to do very little twisting to get your essay to be on topic. Which would be lucky. Instead, you should practise, practise and practise with a wide range of topics within the scope of the study design.

That being said, you can pull it off if you just memories a part of the essay but not all of it. For example, you memorise certain paragraphs for certain ideas that may be expressed in the given topic. That can work very well for you, except know how to twist these ideas and link them to the prompt. Practise linking ideas to the topics.

So in conclusion, I am not found of memorising essays but you should memories textual examples and language analysis techniques.

[Elizawei]

Hey everyone,

What are all of your opinions on memorizing essays for English?
And if you did memorize your essays, how effective did you find it on your marks?

Thanks in advance.

I know there's going to be different opinions here, but personally, memorising essays is what saved my English SS.
I never found myself to be those naturally talented English students, and writing 9-10 mark essays on the stop was defs not something I could just do.
What I'd do before SACs and before the exam was to memorise chunks of the body paragraphs for text response and context (mind you, we had the old SD this year, but you can definitely memorise for Text response )

I agree with FallingStar and the above posters, because yes, regurgitating an essay without adapting it the prompt is extremely dangerous and would not yield good results. However, my teacher always told us to "tweak" our memorised chunks to adapt it to the prompt.

Oh one more thing, memorising essays also give you a MASSIVE confidence boost, which is very very important come exam time
This is pretty brief so if you have any questions feel free to PM me

P.S by no means am i good at English or believe that this the correct way to approach VCE English. Different methods works for different people, and for me, memorising essays worked. You have to experiment in your SACs and try to see what works best

All the best!

[Hydroxyl]

I know there's going to be different opinions here, but personally, memorising essays is what saved my English SS.
I never found myself to be those naturally talented English students, and writing 9-10 mark essays on the stop was defs not something I could just do.
What I'd do before SACs and before the exam was to memorise chunks of the body paragraphs for text response and context (mind you, we had the old SD this year, but you can definitely memorise for Text response )

I agree with FallingStar and the above posters, because yes, regurgitating an essay without adapting it the prompt is extremely dangerous and would not yield good results. However, my teacher always told us to "tweak" our memorised chunks to adapt it to the prompt.

Oh one more thing, memorising essays also give you a MASSIVE confidence boost, which is very very important come exam time
This is pretty brief so if you have any questions feel free to PM me

P.S by no means am i good at English or believe that this the correct way to approach VCE English. Different methods works for different people, and for me, memorising essays worked. You have to experiment in your SACs and try to see what works best

All the best!

Wow! This is amazing! The only issue for me, I don't know how to "tweak" them according to context. How did you go about that?

[natdogg]

I know there's going to be different opinions here, but personally, memorising essays is what saved my English SS.

I'm going to agree with Elizawei here and although I'm not too proud of taking advantage of the system, "memorised" essays if you can masterfully control and manipulate them can be your win condition.

However, if you cannot masterfully and properly adapt and explicitly address the prompt in your essay, you're pretty much doomed 

This definitely won't work for everyone and in fact most people I know who scored in the top range did NOT memorise essays, just something I did because I absolutely hate writing essays which feel subpar (which is why i accidentally spent waaay too long on LA in the exam... and didn't end up finishing context rip)

[alanyin1]

Hey everyone, thought I'd chip in some advice having done English this year.

My honest opinion is that if students have already developed a unique writing style and are confident in expressing themselves, that English shouldn't be a worry.

Having said this, a key component of English this year (last year of study design) which is being addressed and changed for next year is the removal of Context and the addition of a 'Comparison of Texts'. I would dare say that Context has been troublesome for many years, because if any, it was the most 'memorisable' part of English. I have seen many students get away with memorised pieces which are slighlty adjusted to fit different prompts, largely because Context allowed a little too much free space to write whatever you wanted (which was nice, yet exploitable). I'm not sure whether the new addition will completely solve this or not.

As with Language Analysis, although you can memorise writing formats and structures to approach the task in order to express yourself a little more fluidly/layered-ly, I don't see much tangible benefit to memorising pieces for this part.

I feel that Text Response is in the middle of these two extremes; you can memorise key evidence/scenes from texts and incorporate these into many essay topics, particularly because the exam will have 2 topic choices available and it is relatively straightforward to 'snipe' at least one of these topics before time. For instance, the Medea prompt that I wrote on in the exam was EXTREMELY similar to a SAC topic that I wrote on, and, due to the argument presented in my 3rd paragraph, meant that I could copy word for word and it would be fine.

TLDR; I think that if you work ahead and develop your writing 'personality' throughout the year, that you'll do just fine. Having said this, I admit that the system is exploitable, but I think that the removal of Context and the inherent nature of Language Analysis will make it more difficult to get away with memorised pieces. Text Response will still be vulnerable to memorisation though IMO.