Gcse english essay questions

If you have 6, you have around 6 minutes on each. 6 minutes does not make for a lot of development. So for me, it’s a minimum of three points, ideas or reasons, along with development. A maximum of five means you won’t have to sacrifice development. What if you want to slip into the elusive Grade 9 territory?

There will be two questions, one character-based and the other theme-based. You need to choose one of these. The most important thing is to remember to include as much detail as possible, because this tells the examiner that you know the play very well. The essay question covers assessment objectives AO1 (33%) and AO2 (67%).

Last time, I was having a look at a sample text for Question 4, the essay question on AQA’s GCSE English Language (8700) Paper 1, exploring how to annotate and how to plan your response. That followed a post about the mechanics of the question and the markscheme to help you understand what it is all about.

But technically it’s called your ‘thesis statement’). −What’s needed is a confident-sounding statement that gives your overall ‘take’, ‘answer’, ‘view’, ‘conclusion’ (call it what you will!) of the text focused on the essay title or question.