Memorising essays

[jayfan]

For those who aren't naturally talented, it's perfectly viable to memorise essays and change perhaps the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and slightly alter the introduction and conclusion to fit the topic/prompt. I pretty much did this and it served me well. But note that when I say memorise, you don't necessarily sit down and rote learn entire essays. After having written a lot of essays, you will be able to recall your points and phrasing for just about any idea that you want to write about. The thing with writing a 'memorised' essay is that it still has to be relevant to the topic, so you basically just copy and paste a few paragraphs that you've done before which are relevant to the topic. Under no circumstances should you ever go off topic though because your marks will just plummet once the examiner knows you're writing a memorised essay.

bump

rote-learned essays are what assessors most hate, especially for the context section. its better to write heaps of essays, think up as many points as you can beforehand and manipulate them when you see the topic. that way, you would sound more natural but also dont have to think up points on the spot.

[shinny]

For those who aren't naturally talented, it's perfectly viable to memorise essays and change perhaps the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and slightly alter the introduction and conclusion to fit the topic/prompt. I pretty much did this and it served me well. But note that when I say memorise, you don't necessarily sit down and rote learn entire essays. After having written a lot of essays, you will be able to recall your points and phrasing for just about any idea that you want to write about. The thing with writing a 'memorised' essay is that it still has to be relevant to the topic, so you basically just copy and paste a few paragraphs that you've done before which are relevant to the topic. Under no circumstances should you ever go off topic though because your marks will just plummet once the examiner knows you're writing a memorised essay.

bump

rote-learned essays are what assessors most hate, especially for the context section. its better to write heaps of essays, think up as many points as you can beforehand and manipulate them when you see the topic. that way, you would sound more natural but also dont have to think up points on the spot.

That's in essence what I actually meant; I did say that I didn't actually mean to 'rote learn essays'. The first part of my post is quite a oversimplification of what I actually do. Firstly, doing what I said in the second part of my post, really, there's no way for examiners to tell that it's a rote-learned response as the only way to know this is if the response isn't relevant to the topic. I've written responses to VCAA examiners based 90% on what I've written in practise essays, and still scored 10/10 by just adjusting the topic sentences a little, and obviously, being careful in choosing which paragraphs I wished to copy down.