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How extensive should notes be?

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angewina_naguen:

--- Quote from: BakerDad12 on July 23, 2020, 04:56:32 pm ---Hi, it's me again. I've updated my notes with the advice you've given me and it's starting to look pretty solid. I've got about 10 quotes per text for Adv. but I've also heard some people say they're memorising 20 per text. I'm not sure how many quotes to memorise.  The quotes I do have are long quotes, though, like: “Abigail brings the other girls into the court, and where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel. And folks are brought before them, and if they scream and howl and fall to the floor - the person’s clapped in the jail for bewitchin’ them.”

I'm also unsure on how many themes to discuss. Is doing only 3 broad themes for a text like the Crucible limiting my scope?

Could you elaborate a bit on how you did it?

--- End quote ---

Hey, BakerDad12!

Great to hear that your notes are starting to take shape! In an essay, I generally recommend preparing for three themes and using anywhere between 3-5 quotes for each (I worked with three per body paragraph which is why I only needed nine quotes in total for my essay plus a backup one). However, you might also want to prepare two backup themes with the same number of quotes in case you get a question that specifies one of your themes. For example, let's say you prepared to discuss reputation, judgement, responsibility as your main three themes with power and fear. You could get a question like this that requires you to explore this major theme in respects to your other themes.

"Explore the prevalence of fear as a key motivation for the individuals represented in The Crucible."

That doesn't mean you have to memorise 25 quotes or anything along those lines. What I did was choose quotes that worked for multiple themes. As an example, Proctor says to Abigail in Act I "a wild thing may say wild things” which you could use as an example of foreshadowing for the themes of responsibility, power and fear. I then grouped all my quotes under themes to see where the overlaps were and which of my themes were the strongest. This prevented me from having to memorise an excessive amount  8)

I also would recommend having shorter quotes because you are really only analysing techniques, not entire judgements like you would at university level, in HSC English and often, the techniques are not the entire three sentences like you have there. You only need to quote what is being analysed and you can either omit the rest with ellipses or just use it for another piece of analysis for a different theme. With the one you have provided, if you wanted to analyse biblical allusion, you would only need a small portion of the first sentence; "where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel." The rest of it is not as relevant  :) It also saves you heaps of time under exam conditions and you can spend that time instead writing amazing analysis and polishing your response!

Ultimately, you want to work smarter, not harder so if you can limit the amount of time you spend memorising the quotes you have, you can spend more time actually applying them in practice responses and seeing what other gaps in your study that you might need to address. Hope this helps and let me know if there's anything you wanted me to clarify!

Angelina  ;D

BakerDad12:
Hey, what you said helped! Thanks. I'm in a bit of a conflict because my teacher is saying memorise around 15-20, but I like your idea as well. I think I might go for a nice middle ground of 12. Anyway, that's not my question. My question is, I have three themes prepared for the Crucible: conformity, power and integrity. Because human experiences is so broad, do you think I should prepare more themes or be familiarise myself with adapting those three to the question?

angewina_naguen:

--- Quote from: BakerDad12 on July 29, 2020, 09:31:35 pm ---Hey, what you said helped! Thanks. I'm in a bit of a conflict because my teacher is saying memorise around 15-20, but I like your idea as well. I think I might go for a nice middle ground of 12. Anyway, that's not my question. My question is, I have three themes prepared for the Crucible: conformity, power and integrity. Because human experiences is so broad, do you think I should prepare more themes or be familiarise myself with adapting those three to the question?

--- End quote ---

Hey again!

If your teacher's provided some advice, you can definitely consider it as well for the HSC but with Trials around the corner, go with whichever strategy you are most comfortable with  :D

As for your themes, I would recommend perhaps having one backup theme just in case it might be more applicable to the question you get under exam conditions. Otherwise, those three should be more than enough to allow you to have an in-depth discussion on any of the concepts from the rubric  :) Hope that helps and good luck!

Angelina  ;D

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