How Many Words For Paper 1 Unseen Texts (2 Viewers)

[Jojofelyx]

How many words (not like the amount of lines) should I be writing to ensure full marks for 3, 4, 5, and 6 marker questions within reasonable bounds?

This is with the assumption that there still is a good level of quality to the response, obviously, there's no point writing out 2 pages for a 3 marker.

 

[mmmm.]

I would say that you can't really put a number on how many words based on the marks, because same mark questions will ask different things and thus you may have to write more/less than another question worth the same mark. All my teachers in hs have said that the amount of lines is basically a guide on how much to write.

 

[idkkdi]

How many words (not like the amount of lines) should I be writing to ensure full marks for 3, 4, 5, and 6 marker questions within reasonable bounds?

This is with the assumption that there still is a good level of quality to the response, obviously, there's no point writing out 2 pages for a 3 marker.

1 piece of evidence that adds insight per mark is enough.
6 markers i go mini-essaying.
5 marker maybe mini-essay.

main thing is having a specific rather than a generalised answer and linking to q with evaluation.

i generally write around what my essay page count looks like. 4 marker = 20 marker/5, 5 marker = 20 marker/4 etc. maybe minus a bit since in comprehension u write a bit less than raw essay output.

 

[MyHeadee]

How many words (not like the amount of lines) should I be writing to ensure full marks for 3, 4, 5, and 6 marker questions within reasonable bounds?

This is with the assumption that there still is a good level of quality to the response, obviously, there's no point writing out 2 pages for a 3 marker.

Simple answer would just be, as much as you can whilst allocating about 2 min per mark. Usually for 3-4 markers you can 'gain' time that you can then allocate to the 5-6 markers, so for these go slightly under the 2 min per mark. If you can write like 30 words in a minute, then for your 6 markers, give yourself ≈15 mins. Aim for about 330 words, give yourself like 2 mins to read the extract (less time if its an image obviously) and about an extra 2 minutes to express your ideas intelligently whilst you're writing. Try churning it out asap, but, most importantly, keeping your response making sense, and providing something insightful. Its easy to get lost in just recounting things from the passage or image. These are very rough guidelines, just a scaffold to use maybe.

 

[icycledough]

How many words (not like the amount of lines) should I be writing to ensure full marks for 3, 4, 5, and 6 marker questions within reasonable bounds?

This is with the assumption that there still is a good level of quality to the response, obviously, there's no point writing out 2 pages for a 3 marker.

You also have to consider that if 2 people were to have the same length responses (say 1.5 pages for a 6-7 marker, which I think would suffice), people obviously have different writing sizes which means that they may be a big difference in the number of words despite the same length answer. That's why I've never been for asking people how many pages they wrote for their essays, because I've seen people with the smallest writing only get 4 pages, while people with quite chunky writing will write 8 pages. People tend to correlate more pages with a better essay, when in reality, that often isn't the case.

Also consider the time spent for each question. 90 minutes for short answer + an essay means you can choose to split it how you want. The most common ways are 45/45, 50/40 (as essay has been practised while short answer will be completely new). Let's assume most people go with a 45/45 split. So 45 minutes divided by 20 marks is 2.25 minutes per mark. So for your 7-8 mark questions, it makes sense to be spending 15-18 minutes, while for your 2-4 mark questions, you shouldn't be spending more than 5-10 minutes on those.