Area of Study: Discovery

A new term is beginning, and the temptation is to breathe a sigh of relief and pause your Discovery work to get on with your new module. But HSC® Exam English is a funny thing. For a two unit course, there's a heck of a lot of content: four modules and a minimum of nine texts to study (and it's even worse if one of them is Hamlet). Pretty soon, your Discovery studies will be a dim and distant memory. I've seen students completely forget the title of their prescribed text for Discovery by the time they hit term three, not to mention any of the associated ideas or quotes.

 

So what can you do? Be kind to your future self, and make sure you have synthesised everything you've learned so far into easy-to-read study paragraphs. These should be a "best-of" record of your studies, covering all the key Discovery ideas listed in your syllabus rubric for each of your prescribed and additional texts.

 

Step 1: Generate a list of sub-titles

This is the easy bit. List down all the discovery aspects and ideas on one side of your page, and all the characters, or individual poems in a suite on the other. Then cross multiply:

• Prospero's intellectual discoveries
   
• Miranda's intellectual discoveries
   
• Caliban's intellectual discoveries...etc.

Or:

• Intellectual discoveries in Mending Wall.
   
• Spiritual discoveries in Mending Wall.
   
• Emotional discoveries in Mending Wall...etc

Make sure you have written some paragraphs on each aspect of discovery (Physical, Emotional, Creative, Spiritual, and Intellectual Discoveries) so you are prepared for any question the exam throws at you.

 

Step 2: Find quotes and techniques

Go back through the text and create a giant bullet point list of quotes and techniques. Then, simply sort the bullet points under the relevant sub-titles you've already created. Try and use unique quotes every time - don't rely on a small pool of your old favourites.

• “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” → ominous personification of Nature.

• “Good fences make good neighbours.” → Proverb, farmer’s only thought is not original....etc

 

Step 3: Make essay-style paragraphs

Write up everything you know about each sub-title, exhausting all the possible textual plot points related to it. Using your techniques and quotes, you should end up with one or two essay-style paragraphs under each sub-title. Later on, when you've forgotten everything you ever knew about Discovery, these notes will re-teach you the subject, and give you the building blocks to answer a wide variety of essay questions.

 

Keeping Discovery fresh is really that simple. You should end up with about 14-20 paragraphs, depending on what text you've been prescribed. It's a good idea to keep an eye out for practice HSC® Exam exam papers too, so you can take your new paragraphs for a spin and see how they handle during essay practice.