Category Archives: Leaving Cert Paper 2

Paper 2 advice and notes.

Passive vs Active voice

Posted on November 20, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 5 comments

Today was a weird day. On a few levels it was, quite frankly, odd. However, rather than bore you with the mundane minutiae of my daily grind, instead let me share with you an insight I had which concerns the perplexing issue of ‘personal response’.

So I’m in my room, correcting; and I’m eating gluten-free chocolate fingers to distract from the fact that I’m correcting because I hate corrections; and I stumble upon a tour-de-force essay on cultural context in Casablanca. A ‘tour de force’ essay is an essay that’s so insightful, so eloquent and so sophisticated, you wish you’d written it yourself.

I get to the end

and I give it an A.

And then I stop.

Something is bugging me.

I re-read the essay title – “A reader/viewer can feel uncomfortable with the values and attitudes which exist in a society.” To what extent did the values and attitudes portrayed in Casablanca make you feel uncomfortable?

Now I go back to the essay. It’s written in the classic passive voice of academia, where opinions are stated as fact and the writer deliberately makes him or herself invisible. I don’t personally have a problem with the passive voice – it’s how I was trained to write in school and at university. But since the new course came in (way back in 2001) there’s been a renewed emphasis, nay obsession, with personal engagement with the texts.

I’m reading phrases like “it is impossible to feel comfortable” and “it’s difficult to watch this struggle” and “it is an unimaginable horror” and “there is little about this society to praise”. Her engagement with and understanding of the text is everywhere evident. Her analysis of the values and attitudes which dominate in this society is sublime. But she never once used the word “I” – she never said “I felt uncomfortable” or “I found it deeply disturbing” or “I found myself turning away from the screen in disgust”. So I start to wonder if she would be penalised in the exam because her discomfort with this society is implicit rather than explicit.

Let me take a little tangent with you for a second, in case you don’t know the difference between implicit and explicit. If something is implicit it is “implied rather than expressly stated”. So if I say “her choice of outfit for the wedding was… interesting!” I am implying that I didn’t like it but my criticism is veiled: I’m hinting that I disapprove rather than saying it outright. If I wanted to be explicit I’d come right out with it – I’d say “For the love of God, where did she think she was going in that rotten flamenco pink travesty of a dress?”.

Implicit arguments, when subtly and intelligently constructed, can be far more elegant and sophisticated than explicit ones. If I go into school tomorrow and ask my student to alter her essay and insert explicit sentences like those mentioned above (“I feel uncomfortable” “I find it disturbing”) I fear she’ll end up interrupting the flow and beauty of her writing – dumbing it down, in effect, to conform with the demands of an examination system which is dominated by highly specific marking schemes which may not be flexible enough to tolerate the subtlety of her prose. This is where the quality (and attention to detail) of the examiner really becomes vitally important – read closely, her unease with the society is everywhere referenced and evident in her writing; read quickly, or carelessly, you might be tempted to mark her down for “clarity of purpose” – not because she isn’t clear about the task she has been set, but because she chooses to engage indirectly with her discomfort, using the passive, rather than an active and personal, voice.

A related issue then emerged for me, which is the question of whether a student should speak an an individual (“I feel” “I believe” “I was shocked”) or whether a student can reasonably speak on behalf of the entire audience (“we feel” “we believe” “we are shocked”) in which case the student is using what my English teacher used to refer to as ‘the Royal “we”, where he or she writes phrases like “we ask ourselves” “this makes us uneasy” “the reader is shocked that”.

This ‘speaking on behalf of everyone royal ‘we’ (known as the royal ‘we’ because the royal family, like the Queen for example, often say things like “we must see to it that our country maintains the best of its traditions” – she speaks for everyone, not just herself) is good on one level because it shows you are absolutely confident that your ideas represent the consensus. By speaking for everyone you are creating the impression that you have accessed the ‘truth’ of the matter and people may – possibly – respect your certainty and question you no further.

However, this idea of speaking for everyone is also highly problematic. The person reading your work ends up tempted to shout at you panto style “stop pretending you’re not there!”. Personal response is why blogs have become so popular and why newspapers have had to expand their comment and opinion sections. What sentences which include the word “I” recognise is the truth that there is no ‘truth’ about how ‘the reader’ responds because we’re all different. We don’t all think and feel and respond in the same way. There is no one collective consciousness, there are only masses of unique individuals who all respond to the world and everything in it in a way which is uniquely them. Failing to acknowledge this can mean that you come across as stupid or worse still, as arrogant. If you are a brilliant writer with original intelligent insights we may just about accept your arrogance, because it is well earned. If you are not, we’ll just find you irritating.

So what’s my advice?

Well, it was bothering me a lot so I rang a friend of mine who corrects Honours Leaving Cert English (I don’t correct the state exams because I’d end up eating too many gluten-free chocolate fingers and getting really really fat!!!) and he reckons as long as the student engages directly and consistently with the question, they’ll probably get away with using the passive voice.

However, for any student who’s not an A standard, for a student who’s not going to produce a tour-de-force work of academic brilliance, using the active, personal voice is a better option. Explicitly referencing the question asked, repeatedly and consistently throughout your essay (but vary the phrasing, please?), using the word “I” frequently, if the question demands it (‘what did you like?’ ‘what made you uncomfortable?’) is more likely to keep you on track in responding to the question and to be honest, it’s more likely to get you a higher grade in the exam.

5 Comments

Posted in Comparative, Leaving Cert Paper 2, Studied poetry

Tackling Themes

Posted on November 2, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 1 comment

I’ve been getting quite a few questions recently about how to tackle theme questions. There seems to be this overwhelming need to know if you’re doing it RIGHT, to which I say, patronisingly perhaps, there is no single RIGHT way to approach a question.You’ve got to make decisions both before you write and as you are writing, all the while remembering to focus on the question that has been asked.

However, that being said, a few sensible suggestions spring to mind. For me, it’s all about asking simple questions but offering complex replies. Let’s say for example you’re examining the theme of love. It doesn’t really matter what texts you’re studying, you can still ask simple questions which will provide you with an outline structure to follow. Here are some of the questions I’d ask:

How is the theme introduced? Is our first impression as viewers/readers positive or negative and why? Do the central characters embrace love or reject it? Why?
How is this theme developed? Do the characters need love? Do they fight for it? Do they have any control over who they fall in love with? Does love bring happiness or despair or a bit of both?
What obstacles do the characters encounter? Do they achieve lasting love – do they fail or succeed? Why? Is this theme in any way symbolic? (for example, do people withhold love to punish each other? Does finding love correspond to finding happiness or is love associated with destructive emotions in this text? Is a certain type of love (familial, romantic, parent/child) presented as more important than another? Do different types of love (familial / romantic) clash and is a character forced to choose one over the other?).
How does the text end and what final impression of this theme are we left with? Does love conquer everything? Do other forces conspire to destroy love?

There are plenty of other ways of tackling the theme of love, or any theme for that matter. You could structure your essay like this instead:

Romantic love / love triangles
Symbolism & love
Familial love
Final impression

I would argue, however, that you MUST finish your essay by discussing how each text ends. It’s just logical from a sequencing point of view that you end with the end, if that makes sense!

Once you’ve decided what questions you want to ask and more or less what structure your essay will follow, BEWARE! You cannot just do a checklist of questions and tick off each one as you write each sentence. Remember, I said simple questions but complex replies. You also need to have good flow in your answer and ticking off a list of questions you feel you must answer would interrupt this flow. It’s better to keep a general sense of what you want to discuss in mind but allow the ideas to glide onto the page.

WARNING: the examples below are for the 30/40 mark split questions ONLY. In these questions you can discuss a theme in ONE text, then separately discuss the same theme in two others. So I’m assuming you’re discussing ONE on it’s own for 30 marks. If you were doing the 70 mark question you’d need to be moving back and forth between the texts not discussing each text in isolation.

Have a look at this paragraph, which offers simple replies but no depth, no flow, no sophistication!

“The theme of love is first introduced in Casablanca when Rick rejects Yvonne. She wants to know if she’ll see him that night but he brushes her off and sends her home. He’s not really interested in her but he must have slept with her recently because she’s behaving as if they are in a relationship. It’s clear that she’s interested in him but he’s not interested in her. Rick seems like a lone wolf, he’s always going on about how he ‘sticks his neck out for nobody’ so we’re not expecting love to play a major part in this film but we change our mind once Ilsa walks in. Then when Sam plays the song we realise that Rick has had his heart broken by her and we start to realise that being unlucky in love is what has made Rick so cold and stand-offish. So I think love is introduced in a very clever way in this film. The idea that love can hurt you made me want to watch the rest of the film to see if Rick would ever find love again”

So what’s wrong with this paragraph? Let me count the ways:

Bland factual opening sentence – I’m bored already.
Lack of quotes (quotes add depth because they are specific. Vague = bad, specific = good)
Overusing words instead of varying my vocabulary – eg. ‘interested’ 3 times in 2 sentences!
Slang – “he’s always going on about” makes me cringe. Use formal language.
Lack of flow – the writer doesn’t use any connectives. This means that as readers we have the sensation of jumping from sentence to sentence without the ideas being in any way connected. The overall impact is a lack of coherence and an unpleasant jerkiness for the reader, kind of like being in a car with someone who’s learning to drive.
Stating the obvious – “it’s clear she’s interested in him but he’s not interested in her”
Vagueness / lack of key moments – “Ilsa walks in” “Rick [is] cold and stand-offish”. These statements aren’t wrong, but they don’t create a vivid picture in our minds either! Describe Ilsa’s entrance. Don’t write “when Sam plays the song” – WHAT song? Name it!

Now have a look at the example below. A good answer contains sophisticated vocabulary, a flow of ideas, relevant quotes and key moments to support the points being made, and perhaps most importantly of all, depth.

“The opening scenes of “Casablanca” are dominated by fear, corruption and violence, rather than love. Rick, the central protagonist, sits alone playing chess and appears indifferent to those around him. The first hint of a love interest appears in the form of Yvonne, a beautiful French woman in a slinky satin dress but when she asks Rick “will I see you tonight?” he replies “I never plan that far ahead”. His cold hard exterior, exemplified by his oft repeated motto “I stick my neck out for nobody” creates the impression of a man incapable of love and his isolation seems very much self-inflicted. However, this assumption is quickly challenged in the key moment when Ilsa Lunde appears. The film highlights her significance through soft lighting, a dramatic musical score and lingering close-ups. The song “As Time Goes By” reveals much about Ilsa and Rick’s past, both in the lyrics (“the world will always welcome lovers”) and in Sam’s reluctance to play it. Rick’s anger (“I thought I told you never to play…”) trails off into shock when he sees Ilsa and he then breaks every rule he has made for himself of not sitting with customers and never paying a tab. As he recounts in minute detail the last time they met (“I remember every detail. The Germans wore grey. You wore blue”) we realise that here is a man whose heart has been so badly broken that he is no longer willing to risk the joy of falling in love for fear of the pain which may follow. As a viewer, I was seduced by their chemistry and overwhelmed with curiosity to see whether they could rekindle their love or at the very least forgive each other for the pain and bitterness their failed love affair has caused.

How do you achieve this depth in your answer? Think of the theme as a very real human experience, whether it’s love or friendship or isolation or violence or fate. Think of the character as a real person. Art imitates life. We study themes so that we can understand life on a deeper level; we don’t study them because we have to sit an exam (ok, some people do, but I think they’re kind of missing the point, which is that literature offers us wisdom by holding up a mirror to life and asking us to examine it in order to understand our experiences on a deeper level). As you are writing ask yourself all the time what you are learning as you read/watch/respond. That’s the key really – you must respond! Emotionally and intellectually you must engage with these characters as if they were real people. As a teacher I see this response all the time in my classroom, when students laugh or cry or cringe or are shocked but many students struggle to remember and relive the emotions they felt at the time when they’re writing about it later, sometimes months later. Try to climb back into the experience of reading / watching your text. This is why re-reading, re-watching is so so very important. As an aside, I did Wuthering Heights as my leaving cert novel (this was in the era before the comparative) and I read it three times over the two years of my senior cycle. Yes, I know that makes me a hopeless nerd but it also helped get me my A1. And honestly, I re-read the book because I loved it so much, not because I had to write about it in an exam.

Finally, please remember that blocks of writing on ONE text are only acceptable for the 30 / 40 mark split where you are asked to discuss one text on its own. Otherwise, have a look here and here for how to structure the 70 mark question.

Hope this helps!

Evelyn

1 Comment

Posted in Comparative

Sample Poetry Paragraph

Posted on September 19, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 3 comments

What are the essential ingredients you should try to integrate when discussing poetry? To me, they are

Themes / ideas
Techniques
Feelings – poet
Feelings – reader / personal response
Quotes
References (paraphrased)
Links to other poems
Linking phrases (to create flow)
Context and/or biographical detail (where relevant)

Now check out this sample paragraph of critical analysis and see if you can figure out which colour refers to which of the elements listed above.

(ps. If you were in my class when we did this exercise today, just a quick warning, the colours are different so don’t allow that to confuse you when you’re poring over this trying to do your homework…)

“Living in Sin” offers a fascinating exploration of male/female relationships. As with “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, the poem is built around a series of contrasts but this time Rich embraces free verse; the entire poem flows down the page in a series of lengthening run-on lines. The woman in the poem (presumably Rich herself) soon finds “dust upon the furniture of love” when she moves in with her lover. Her preoccupation with household chores (she “pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found a towel to dust the table-top”) is cleverly juxtaposed with his laid-back demeanour; he “shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes”. She brilliantly evokes her frustration as she focuses obsessively on dripping taps, grimy windows, empty beer bottles and leftover food (in many ways this reminds me of my own mother!). However, rather than simply blame the man (as she had previously done in AJT), here she begins to question the deeply ingrained gender roles which programme women to notice clutter and dirt. I love how she also recognises that obsessing over housework is somehow foolish (she is being “jeered by the minor demons”) and she admits that she envies his ability to prioritise his creativity (she admires his paintings, particularly his “cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse”). Ultimately however, her anger and resentment at being reduced to nothing more than a ‘housewife’ boil over (like the coffee pot on the stove). I found the final image in the poem haunting and terribly sad, as depression sets in “throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs”.

3 Comments

Posted in Studied poetry

Tagged leaving cert poetry, sample poetry paragraph, writing about poetry

Seamus Heaney RIP

Posted on August 30, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 6 comments

to grab your sorrow by the throat

to grapple with it and lunge it heaving from your chest

and force it into words

is no easy task.

we spent hours together you and I.

you never saw me,

we never spoke,

now, we never will.

but in my mind I knew you –

and in your words, you knew us all –

and that,

my friend,

is enough.

[soundcloud url=http://soundcloud.com/leaving-cert-english/sets/seamus-heaney/]

6 Comments

Posted in Studied poetry, Teachers, Unseen poetry

Tagged poem, RIP, seamus heaney, tribute

Bliss

Posted on August 18, 2013 by evelynoconnor | 1 comment

The play, the play and the other play.

London is a wonderful playground, particularly if you love a good play. I was expecting to be wowed by my first theatre trip of the weekend and in so many ways I was. Eve Best’s Macbeth in the Globe, with it’s soaring violins, pounding drums, cacophony of creepy witches, sumptuous Jacobean costumes (finally a version which resists the urge to ‘modernise’) and genuinely terrifying Lady Macbeth (Samantha Spiro) whipped along at a tremendous pace. The hiss of Lady M entreating her husband to “screw your courage to the sticking place”, the mounting tension as Duncan’s body is discovered and all eyes turn to Macbeth (Joseph Millson), the arrogant majesty of his coronation as his wife physically shrinks under the weight of her gown and crown and the powerful presence of Banquo (Billy Boyd) stalking his former friend at the Banquet (even if this scene was otherwise played for laughs) carry us forward to the interval at a breathtaking pace.

The second half surges out of the blocks with the witches cauldron spewing forth the future in an instant, while echoes of Lady Macbeth threatening to pluck her nipple from her child’s boneless gums resonate as one of the witches gently lays a baby into Macbeth’s open childless arms and assures him that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth”. All too soon we are drowning in palpable loathing and panic and fear as Lady Macduff realises that innocence is no protection against evil in this world; we experience the heartbreaking pause in the action as Macbeth receives news of his wife’s death; we hear the sickening crack as Macbeth’s head is snapped off his body and he lurches to the floor, and lose ourselves in the haunting melody of the witches final song. All of these moments will stay with me.

So, too, will the unexpected moments of humour the cast so cleverly found in an otherwise, let’s face it, pretty bleak script. As they await Macduff, gone to awaken Duncan, Lennox’s ponderous, elaborate description of the turmoil in nature is met with Macbeth’s eye-rolling dry retort “twas a rough night” just to shut him up. As the nobles spill out of the banquet, one idiot stays behind to try and ease the awkwardness of the situation, but his clumsy spluttering of “better health” for the King is met with gales of laughter from the crowd and a disbelieving stare from the shattered Lady Macbeth. When Malcolm accuses himself of boundless lust, with some pretty funny thrusting and moaning, Macduff gestures to the standing crowd with the line “we have willing dames enough” and Malcolm’s later sheepish admission “I am yet unknown to woman” brought the house down almost as uproariously as when Macbeth told the porter to get back in his box.

And yet something was awry. Part of the problem lay with my over-familiarity with the source material. For the first few scenes I was like a teenager at a One Direction concert, lip-syncing along to every line. But willing suspension of disbelief demands that you buy into the notion that the characters are spontaneously making this stuff up – which is difficult when every line is playing in your head before the character even opens their mouth.

The second problem lay not with me but with the play’s interpretation of Macbeth’s journey. I’ve always loved the way Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s journeys mirror each other in reverse – as she finds that she can no longer stop up the access and passage to remorse, he uncovers the very ruthlessness his wife believed him incapable of as the play began. But this vulnerability, this “milk of human kindness” is so rarely on show in Joseph Millson’s very edgy physical portrayal of this most complex of anti-heroes, that we don’t ever really get the sense of this being a journey from good to evil. I’ve always believed that the strength of this play lies in our ability to feel “horror, horror, horror” at his fall from grace, a horror so powerful that we bless ourselves and mutter ‘but for the grace of God go I’. Instead, we get a journey from sanity to insanity, a less moving, less profound, less frightening vista entirely. So when Macbeth began that most famous of soliloquies “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” I was devastated to hear him creep in a petty pace from word to word, as though he believed that inserting long pauses into the speech would be enough to create drama or pathos. It may have worked for others, it did not work for me and it made me sad to be in the Globe and yet so unmoved at this most emotional juncture in Shakespeare’s great tragedy.

The second play was play of another kind altogether, teasing my sister that I visit only as an excuse to go to the theatre; meeting up with Simon Pile, one of my fellow ADE’s to dream dreams of what might lie in store for Cinetivity, our six-strong creative conclave born in Cork; eating a leisurely lunch of chilli men and coconut ice-cream for desert; again teasing my sister and her lovely husband Kevin that I visit only to go to the theatre and then planning when I should come back and what shows I really can’t afford to miss and remembering, if ever I had forgotten, that she and I are kindred spirits really, even if our mutual obsession with work work work means we don’t connect as often as sisters should.

The final play, recommended by Simon (I am now eternally in your debt my friend) was a curious incident indeed. In life, sometimes, unexpected moments grab you by the throat and you are helplessly at their mercy, trapped in a spell of magic and enchantment and awe. And so it was last night with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time“. I do not have a review to offer you. There is nothing to critique. I have only overflowing praise for a performance and production which amounted to a flawless piece of theatre. If somehow the planets align for you, go and see this play. It speaks so profoundly to our foibles and our flaws and to the tragic beauty of the human condition that I find myself even now stuck in a wonderful moment, reliving the experience with a pang of joy in my heart. Moments which “catch the heart off guard and blow it open” are rare in life and having so many of them in one weekend is blessing indeed.

So as the noise of a million connections reinserts itself into my life later today, I remember that in life it is always good to play.

And play.