Thread by @English_MrsC

It's almost Literature exam time! One of the biggest barriers to student success is the unknown element. You can't prepare your students for every single possible question, but you can arm them with knowledge that can be used to answer a range of different questions. Thread 🧵

#AnInspectorCalls
Distil this bad boy down to one word: inequality. I have not yet come across an exam question that could not be answered by focusing on the inequality presented in the play.
Class? Smashed it
Gender? Donesies
Characters? The dunk has been slammed

Of course, you need a little more than just inequality. Which is where our old pal stagecraft comes in.
Priestley's use of "brighter and harder" isn't just a catchy quotation. Bertolt Brecht was a proponent of the use of white light to illuminate the truth.

Make a lovely little link to Priestley's use of the conventions of Epic theatre and the hyper-realism that goes along with a didactic play. Something along the lines of "Priestley uses Brechtian conventions to literally shine a light on the inequality in society."

Consider also: what do we *not* see? Edna and Eva-Daisy are conspicuous by their absence. Hmmm...working-class women, not really given a voice, and hardly even seen most of the time? A nice little bit of out-of-sight, out-of-mind going on here. Which brings us back to: INEQUALITY

I could spend hours going round and round here, but since focusing on one key concept from the play, my students have found it easier to begin an essay as they know they will always link it back to inequality.

#PowerAndConflict
Sounds obvious, but our old pal, the Power and Conflict anthology is full of (wait for it; there's a riotous twist on the horizon) power. And some conflict. Focus on those two things because...

...as far as context is concerned, it's never going to be possible to cover each individual poem in the depth that we cover the other texts' contexts in. But the key ideas of Power and Conflict - now there's some AO3 that you might not have even thought about.

What is Power? What is Conflict? Consider these ideas as part of the human condition, and you can score some pretty decent marks, even if you've forgotten which wave of Romanticism Percy Shelley belonged to.

Another top tip for sorting out all those pesky poems is to group them into clusters of 3/4 that make sense to *your* brain. I like to match Exposure, Charge of the Light Brigade, Storm on the Island and Kamikaze, for example. Or Remains, The Prelude and Exposure.

Find 2 or 3 points of common ground between your clusters, and then you're prepared with a bank of ideas before you even get to the exam hall.

Finally, #Macbeth
Now for Shakespeare, I like a good old motif. Something that appears throughout the play and can work as a thread, weaving ideas together. One of my favourites is ornithological imagery - look at the birds that are used to describe Big Mac at different points.

You can also use the one key concept idea again. For Macbeth, most things can be linked back to some sort of contrast - Shakespeare uses foils like he's Brad Mondo doing a full head of highlights - and the juxtaposition of good and evil is clearly evident throughout.

My last top tip for the Shakespeare is to consider the name of the section; it's Extract to Whole question. Use the extract to springboard into the whole. Find something in the extract that links to the question, and find a compare/contrast moment from the play.

This really eases the cognitive load for students in exams. The extract will jog their memory, giving them "oh, that's like that other bit" thoughts, and allowing them to retrieve information and feel confident in their knowledge.