Muuuuuuuuuuuuh... Exams always make me moan, and I never revise for them. Well, I did a few times, but I still just got a B in biology and the other time I was just hoping that staring at the book long enough would help. Now, I worked out a new method of cramming this info in my head.
Can you guess? ...No, I'm not making a flash game about trigonometry. I don't know how yet. Try again.
...I already said I just stare at the book and hope. Ok, I'll tell you. I'll blog about it!
For English, they split it into two halves (Lang and Lit) and split the first half into two papers with two sections each. I shall mock these section by section until I accidentally remember the stuff.
Paper 1 Section A is analysing non-fiction texts, or, in an ironic english, looking at crappy articles and booklets and whatnot and seeing all the dramatic effects they put in without realising. Seriously, a good number of these are articles and if I wasn't told what their point was by the paper, I would never guess.
At one point in time, I was answering questions about an article against young teen votes and, due to uncounered agruments for young votes and philosophies that there's no age of maturity, I assumed he was pro-voting at 16.
They have their opinions disguised as facts, as the actual facts are against their point, and they have to find respected scientists or psychologists in fields so far from the actual subject debated you can tell they just went through a million people who know what they're talking about until he got to one who agreed with them. Then you must refer the captions of a picture to the style it's in and discuss what message this gives (apparently you get marked down for saying 'it was picked because it's pretty') and look at all the language techniques used. Frankly people reading newspapers don't care much for similes.
I find this section is my weakest. Wonder why...
Paper 1 section B I do far better in. This is the non-fiction writing section where you have 45 minutes to either pursuade some guy (normally a head teacher), argue some point (usually in a teen magazine, and my usual choice) or advise something.
It's fun being argumentative, as my previous blogs could tell you. In fact, I reckon it's a limited time until the exam gives you the option to write the text for a blog. That'd definitely be a future blog.
The things you write about are normally linked to section A, thus giving you a chance to correct the argumentative viewpoint from the first section. I expect to get a higher grade than the article I argue against ever would. Eg: If the argument was about violence, you'd be given the chance to argue for or against a ban violence in films. (Psst, I'll blog about that once I'm done with this. You probably read that first, though.)
I nearly always pick the against option, as the point you get to argue for or against is usually just codswallop.
If the exam was a whole lot less important, you could expect alot of surreal essays. In a revision lesson today, there was a question to advise local newcomers. This seems simple, until you remember that the examiner will never be bothered to check this is true, being too busy looking for your techniques. So the extract "Why are the tanks armed? For your protection, of course!" would earn you some marks for rhetorical questions and exclamation marks.
Apparently, in one section, someone wrote "English is s-" and then something I won't say as the entire thing and still got two marks. You do not have to be serious in this. You can lie. There'll be a lot of teachers assuming that 83% of films have used the word 'stab', but aside from that, who cares?
I'm going to be doing this in many bits from here until I'm done because, not sure if you knew this, but there's a lot of exams and I can write alot about them. This is only one paper. I might write about RS soon, or I'll write about the other english paper. But you can expect that I'll definitely write alot.
Final words that I shall repeat at the end of every exam blog: Don't Panic.
No comments:
Post a Comment