To Memorise or Not to Memorise? - HSC® Exams

There is no escaping writing essays when it comes to HSC® Exam English. A question that tends to be a hurdle for a lot of HSC® Exam students when they want to study for English is whether or not they should try to memorise their essays. The answer, as is the case for most HSC® Exam-related questions, is not a simple yes or no… So let’s have a look at some of the pros and cons of memorising essays, and how it is possible to study for English!
 
If you are someone who plans to have some pre-written essays, memorise them, and regurgitate them in your HSC® Exam exams, there is one golden rule you need to abide by if you are going to do so with any success: you need to be able to adapt your essay to the exam question on the day. This relies on two main things; your deep knowledge of your texts, as well as your complete familiarity with your essay. If you know your texts with utter confidence, then you should be able to respond to whatever question is thrown at you. Knowing all the themes and appropriate quotes and explanations is what you spend most of your term studying anyway. Having a memorised essay is good in the sense that a big chunk of your thinking is already done; you just have to write out a response to a specific question. To do this well, think of your pre-written essay as more of a skeleton for your HSC® Exam exam. You have the foundations, and so come exam day, you need only mould the specificities of your text to the question you are given. Again, this is accompanied by your understanding your essay well enough to know what parts you can take out, or add in, so that your answer fits the question you are given.
 
The biggest issue with memorising essays is that students often disregard the HSC® Exam question, and decide to write out what they had originally memorised. This is bad for obvious reasons: if you are not answering the question or responding to the stimulus given to you, you cannot expect to get a high grade. The best defence against this problem is to practice adapting pre-written essays to several HSC English past paper questions. One of the key to success is to make sure that your base material or memorized essay is neither too specific nor too general: you want to be able to adapt it to a range of questions but also be able to make it sound original and relevant.
 
If this sounds like too much of a headache and you decide that you’d rather walk into the exam room with minimal preparation- and no memorised essays- you still need to have impeccable knowledge of your text. If you truly know all the details of your texts, including quotes, explanations, themes, characters, and main ideas, then you should be able to freely write about your texts, regardless of what question is thrown at you. You should basically be an expert on your texts in order to do this with great success. It isn’t enough to know some major themes or characters after reading your text once. You should ideally be reading your texts at least twice to fully understand major themes, quotes, or ideas. You then need to reflect on the texts and create a list of quotes and explanations that you can group together and store as essay writing arsenal come exam day.
 
The biggest issue for those who decide to write an impromptu essay is that such students usually have great textual understanding, but their essay may suffer structurally. To avoid this, and to make sure you are making the right decision by not having a pre – prepared essay, your essay writing skills have to be absolutely immaculate. There are, of course, things you can do to make sure your essay writing skills are amazing, the most obvious one being... to practice writing impromptu essays! A suggestion is to have a look at past HSC® Exam English papers, and write an impromptu essay as you time yourself for forty minutes, in order to simulate the exam. Then repeat. Trust me: the first one may feel like mission impossible but it will get easier and easier to generate a decent essay in that short time frame


At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide whether you should or shouldn’t memorise essays for your HSC® Exam English. No one knows your strengths and weaknesses  better than yourself, and so you know what works best for you. Make sure you give both techniques a go before you decide though! Either way, be confident in your skills and knowledge, and trust that you can answer any question that is thrown at you!