How do I approach an unseen question in an exam situation?

Being presented with an unseen text in a timed exam can seem intimidating, but actually this question is an opportunity to boost your marks. This is the only situation when everyone taking the exam is in the exact same boat, with no additional reading or contextual knowledge – you are all being tested on a set of techniques, which are straightforward to learn. In most unseen exam questions, you’ll have about 45-50 minutes to write an essay on the extract. This leaves you around 5 minutes at the beginning, before you start writing or planning at all, purely to read the extract. First, just put down your pen and read from start to finish, taking your time so that you know exactly what the extract is about. Make sure you also make a mental note of any background information given, such as date, context, author – everything the examiner chooses to include can be relevant in your essay! (However, if there is no contextual information about the text there is no point trying to guess possible authors or time periods – just focus exclusively on what the paper includes.) After you have a clear idea of the content of the text, pick your pen back up and begin to annotate. This is when you should start to think about the text in relation to the question. Some exam questions might just ask for you to comment on the poem in general, in which case it’s useful to have a basic checklist in mind of features to look out for, so you can point out the widest possible range of techniques. For example, you could think about: form, meter, rhyme, stanzas, structure, enjambment/caesura, punctuation, voice/narration, characters, adjectives, verbs, imagery, similes, metaphors, symbolism. (Coloured pens or highlighters could be useful here!) If you’re being asked to talk about the text in relation to a specific theme, or in comparison to something you’ve read before, you can be more selective in what you annotate, but still make sure the quotes you make a note of cover language, form and structure. Now you have an idea of what you want to focus on in your essay it shouldn’t take long to transfer your annotations into a brief plan (eg a few bullet points for each paragraph accompanied with quotes from the extract.) Make sure to begin your essay with a succinct introductory sentence which summarises the text and places it in context, if possible.