The first and most essential thing you need to do is understand the topic and the question. This understanding will depend on your knowledge of the main themes raised within your prescribed texts for each module within the English Standard syllabus. Simplifying terminology used within the syllabus is a good way of understanding the syllabus themes more effectively. For example, you can rewrite something like
"the detriments of utopian societies" as
"the cons of a perfect world". Such modifications make such themes/terminology easier to understand. Once your understanding of the relevant concepts becomes more thorough, you can start to change/improve your vocabulary accordingly in order to reflect what the syllabus suggests.
Once you have gained a deep understanding of the topic and question, you can move on to the second step, which is to start analysing. One of the main questions you can ask yourself at this stage is
"how does this technique give this meaning?" Solely listing techniques is not enough - you need to make sure you correctly identify and explain the effect these techniques have on the text and how this is relevant to the question you're answering. A good way to write good quality responses is to look for a relevant theme or idea within the text and determine how it was communicated in the text through the techniques you've studied. The ability to utilise quotes is also essential for writing high-quality answers as not only does using quotes (where appropriate) help you strengthen your answer, but it also shows you've understood the text well.
The last thing you should do in relation to answering exam questions is to engage with the texts. This means that your answer should not just contain things like a summary of themes or general techniques that can apply to various texts. I believe markers can determine when you've done something like that and this might affect your mark for that question as a result. What you should do instead, is to elaborate on your perception of the text and how this perception was evidenced in this text, which is where your ability to find and thoroughly explain techniques and quotes becomes relevant.
To sum up, your answer should be structured as such:
- Identifying a relevant idea/theme within the text
- Finding evidence for this idea/theme (e.g. techniques and quotes)
- Establishing the connections these have with the idea/theme and link those back to the question.
The ability to find techniques within different types of texts comes from extensive study of techniques (including the effect they generally have on texts) as well as practice. The first thing you need to do in terms of techniques is to revise all techniques you've learned in English and understand how they're used. You should also list examples of sentences/quotes/texts where such techniques are used as this can boost your understanding of the way in which a technique is used. Once you feel you understand all techniques, you should start practising relevant questions and do your best to identify as many techniques as possible. The more you do this, the more you'll get used to this process and the easier it will become for you to identify techniques.
I hope this helps!
