How to memorise essays and long responses
Lauren Condon
Marketing Specialist at Atomi
When it comes to memorising essays or long responses for your exams, there are three big things to consider.
- Should you even try to memorise an essay?
- Do you know how to adapt your memorised response to the exam question?
- How on earth are you meant to memorise a 1,200 word essay??
It’s a lot to weigh up but we can help you out here. If you want an answer to the first question, here’s one we prepared earlier. But wait, there’s more! If you’re super keen to read more about question #2, then go ahead and click here .
And for that third point on how to actually memorise a long essay? Well, all you have to do is keep reading...
1. Break it down
Your essay/long response/creative writing piece could be anywhere between 800 and 1,200 words long. Yeah… that’s a lot. So when it comes to memorising the whole thing, it’s a lot easier to break the answer down into logical chunks and work on memorising it bit by bit.
So if you want to memorise your Discovery Essay, you might have something like this:
- Introduction
- Theme 1 with the assigned text
- Theme 1 with the related text
- Theme 2 with the assigned text
- Theme 2 with the related text
You’re going to want to memorise the paragraphs and pay attention to the structure then you can piece it all together in the exam. Having a killer structure makes it a lot easier to remember the overall bones of this situation and if you’re finding this effective, you can even break those body paragraphs down further like topic sentence > example > explanation > connection to thesis.
2. Use memory tricks
Now, there are lots of different strategies and approaches when it comes to memorising a long piece of writing. Moving in sections, you can try reading it out loud over again (slowly looking at the paper less and less) or the classic look-cover-write-check approach. If you’re really struggling, make some of your own flashcards that have the first sentence on one side and the next sentence on the back so you can test your progress.
You could also enlist the help of some creative mnemonics (memory tricks) to remind you which sentence or section needs to come next. Pick one keyword from each sentence in the paragraph and turn them into a silly sentence to help you remember the structure of the paragraph and to make sure you don’t forget one of your awesome points.
3. Play to your strengths
Not all of us are super geniuses that can just read an essay and then memorise the entire thing but we’re all going to have our own strengths. There’s going to be something whether it’s art, music, writing, performance or sport that just ‘clicks’ in your brain and this is what you want to capitalise on. So for me, I was really into debating and public speaking (hold back the jokes please) and was used to giving speeches and remembering them. So whenever I wanted to memorise a long response, I would write out the essay onto palm cards and then practice it out loud like a speech. Did it annoy my family? Yes. Was I too embarrassed to tell people my strategy? Yes. Did it work? Absolutely. 💯
Whatever your strengths are, find a way to connect them to your essay and come up with a creative way of learning your long response that will be much easier and more effective for you!
4. Start early
So you know how there’s that whole long-term/short-term memory divide? Yeah well that’s going to be pretty relevant when it comes to memorising. You’re going to have a much better chance of remembering your long response if you start early and practice it often, instead of trying to cram it in the night before… sorry.
The good news is, you still have a couple of months before the HSC so try to get your prepared response written, get good feedback from your teachers and then make it perfect so it’s ready to go for the HSC. Then, the next step is to start memorising the essay now and test yourself on it fairly regularly all the way up to your exams. This way, you have plenty of time to really lock it deep into your memory.
5. Test yourself
The final and maybe even most important step is to test yourself. And not with flashcards or the look-cover-check-repeat anymore. Once you’ve got the essay memorised pretty well, you want to spend the weeks coming up to HSC doing past questions so you can practice
- Having the essay memorised
- Being able to recall it under pressure
- Adapting it to any question so that all your hard work will actually pay off
For this to work, you really need to commit 100% to exam conditions (no cheating!) and it’s definitely worth sending those responses to your teacher to get them marked. That way, you will actually know if you’re doing a good job of remembering the core of your argument but also tailoring it perfectly to the question.
Any subject with essays or long responses can be super daunting so if you want to have a pre-written, adaptable response ready to go then it’s worth making sure you can actually memorise it for your exam. Remember to break down the essay into sections, play to your memory strengths and make sure you consistently test yourself all the way up to HSC. That should do the trick. 👌
Published on
July 28, 2017
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How to memorise English Essays effectively and adapt them to ANY question
Struggling to see how you'll write a whole essay in only 40 minutes? Not sure whether you should memorise an essay or go in blind? We got you! Here's our fool proof step-by-step guide to memorise essays that you can adapt to ANY question.
10 months ago • 4 min read
Should I have a pre-written English Essay?
The answer to this is yes and no. NO you should not know have only one essay mindlessly memorised word for word that you just regurgitate back onto the page. But YES you do want to have several essay plans with quotes and analysis imprinted in the back of your head that you can call upon under pressure.
If you’re memorising an essay word for word, you’re giving yourself no room to adapt. Subsequently, your essay won't be relevant to the question, rendering all your hard work futile. Furthermore, you won't be able to tackle curveball questions that they are known to give, asking you to reference a certain theme or even worse, a certain scene or character.
In essence, you want to have a few template essays that you can quickly mould to perfectly fit any question.
What you should be doing
Step 1. form opinions and ideas about the text.
First is to actually have a thorough understanding of the text you are studying. Most importantly you need to be able to formulate original arguments and opinions regarding the essay.
I recommend starting by finding three practice essay questions and just having a think about how you would approach answering them. What themes or characters would you maybe reference? Where do you stand with the question, do you agree or disagree and why?
This will give you an idea about which themes or aspects of the text interest you and you can focus your analysis down on that.
Step 2. Study by theme
Pick four themes to focus your study efforts on. These themes will make the basis of your essays. Try to pick themes that somewhat relate together so that you can form a cohesive argument.
For example, you believe the composer uses their text to expose the fragility of human motivations by exploring notions of love and pride. You are examining two separate themes but they lead to the same argument, human motivations can be easily manipulated or changed.
For each of your four themes have a set of quotes and their analysis memorised. Even better, memorise a few possible topic sentences that you could pair up with these quotes.
Step 3. Break it down
Once you've collected your themes and quotes it's time to see how they all piece together in an essay. Find a practice essay question and spend some time creating a well-crafted essay. This will test how well your quotes and analysis work in an argument to an essay question.
When you finish try to get feedback on your work from either a teacher or tutor. You want this essay to be as well written as possible because this will form the base for future essays.
Once you are happy with your essay deconstruct it. This could be by highlighting key bits of analysis and quotes or turning them into dot-point summaries - chuckable portions that are easy to memorise. I found the best way was to use a table but you can experiment with what works for you (flowcharts, flashcards, dot points). By deconstructing it like this you aren't mindlessly memorising an essay word for word but actively visualising the inner workings of your words and imprinting key ideas into your mind.
Below are some examples of how you can format it. You will want to customise it based on the type of essay or module you are tackling.
Step 4. Practice, Practice, Practice...
This last step is the most important. Although it seems time-consuming and quite a pain, the only way to train your brain for under-pressure essay adaption is to write essays over and over again until it becomes instinct.
Use your above planner to do another practice essay under timed conditions and see how you go. You may find yourself short on time and struggling to compose your ideas. You may even come to find your first essay plan is rigid and your themes don't at all work with this new question. No biggie, go looking for some new quotes to add to your essay planner and edit your ideas to make them more adaptable.
Once you finish that essay, you guessed it, you'll attempt another one! You will want to do this at least three more times before your exam, practising using your quotes and ideas against new essay questions. If you get tired or are short on time you can just brainstorm how you would tackle the questions by dot-pointing your paragraphs. Eventually, this will become instinct and you'll do this effortlessly.
Want more personalised tips to drastically improve your English mark? A private tutor can make the biggest difference!
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