You can only carry so much

Everybody knows this exam is closed book. The book is not in front of you, the extract may be short or absent, and whatever you want to quote has to come out of your own head. ⚠️ AND ALMOST EVERYBODY DRAWS THE SAME CONCLUSION FROM THAT: I MUST LEARN MORE QUOTATIONS. ⭐⭐ THAT CONCLUSION IS WRONG, AND SEEING WHY CHANGES HOW YOU REVISE. Closed book does not just make quoting harder. It changes what a quotation is FOR. With the book open, a quotation is something you go and find. You have the question in front of you, you know what you want to prove, and you look for the line that proves it. The library is enormous and you visit it on demand. ⭐ CLOSED, YOU ARE NOT VISITING A LIBRARY. YOU ARE UNPACKING A BAG YOU PACKED WEEKS AGO, AND IT IS A SMALL BAG. So the question stops being which quotations are the best ones and becomes which ones earn a place in the bag. ⭐⭐ AND THE ANSWER IS NOT THE FAMOUS ONES. IT IS THE PORTABLE ONES. A portable quotation has two properties and both matter. ⚠️ IT IS SHORT ENOUGH TO RECALL EXACTLY. This is the one students underrate. A long passage you can only half remember is worth nothing at all, because an approximate quotation is not evidence and a marker cannot credit words the writer did not write. ⭐⭐ AND IT ANSWERS MORE THAN ONE QUESTION. Six words you can place precisely might serve a question about a character, a question about a theme, and a question about how the story is told, in the same exam. Set those two properties against the usual revision instinct. The famous set-piece passage is long, everybody quotes it, and it tends to prove exactly one thing. The small odd phrase nobody mentions is short, and because it is small it can be pointed in several directions. ⭐ WHICH GIVES YOU SOMETHING NO REVISION GUIDE OFFERS: A TEST FOR WHETHER A QUOTATION IS WORTH LEARNING AT ALL, AND THEREFORE A POINT AT WHICH YOU CAN STOP. Carry one question through everything that follows: how many different questions could this quotation answer?

Famous, portable, and useless

Three kinds of quotation a student might pack. Only the middle column is worth the space it takes up.

Tap the two worth packing

Tap the TWO quotations that are portable: short enough to recall exactly, and usable for more than one question.

Bah! Humbug!
Reader, I married him.
A full paragraph describing the weather on the night of the visitation, about sixty words long
Something along the lines of the narrator saying she felt very alone at that point

Nearly right is not evidence

A candidate reproduces a long quotation with two or three words changed, and the point they build on it is a good one. Why is that a serious problem?

Because an approximate quotation is not evidence: the argument now rests on words the writer did not write, and a marker cannot credit an analysis of wording that is not the wording
Because long quotations are penalised for taking up space
Because that passage is quoted by too many candidates
It is not a problem, as long as the point being made is sound

The words the mark scheme uses

Five terms, each defined by what it is. The first is the skill a short quotation forces you to use.

Match each quotation to its verdict

A two-word outburst from a character, early in the novel
A four-word sentence in which the narrator addresses the reader directly
A sixty-word description of a landscape
A line you can remember the sense of but not the wording
A sentence that records an event and nothing else

Worth packing: tiny to recall, and it carries a character, an attitude and a starting point to change from
Worth packing: it does the story, the teller and the reader all at once, which is three questions from four words
Leave it: beautiful and too long to reproduce exactly, so the risk of an approximate version outweighs what it proves
Leave it: a remembered sense cannot be quoted at all, and paraphrasing it as a quotation would misrepresent the text
Leave it: it can only ever support a retelling, since there is nothing in the wording to analyse

Two that follow from a small bag

Select the TWO statements that follow from a closed-book exam limiting how much you can carry.

Revision becomes selecting rather than collecting, which is a far smaller job than learning everything
A short quotation can be worth more than a famous one, because it can be recalled exactly and pointed in several directions
The candidate who has memorised the most quotations will always do best
Since the text is not available, quotations are not really needed in the answer

Packing the bag, and using it

Two routines. The first is for the weeks before, the second is for the twenty minutes on the day. ⭐⭐ PACKING. GO THROUGH THE NOVEL LOOKING FOR SHORT LINES THAT POINT IN MORE THAN ONE DIRECTION, AND WRITE BESIDE EACH ONE THE QUESTIONS IT COULD ANSWER. If you cannot name two, it is probably not worth the space. If you can name three, learn it first. ⭐ AND PREFER SIX WORDS TO SIXTY. ⚠️ THE LONG ONE WILL DECAY INTO AN APPROXIMATION AND THE SHORT ONE WILL NOT, AND AN APPROXIMATION CANNOT BE ANALYSED. Aim for a small number you own completely rather than a long list you half know. A dozen quotations you can place exactly will cover more questions than forty you cannot. ⭐⭐ USING. EMBED RATHER THAN ANNOUNCE. A short quotation is easy to weave into your own sentence, and weaving it is what lets you analyse the wording rather than gesture at it. A quotation dropped in after a colon tends to sit there while the sentence moves on without it. THEN ANALYSE THE WORDING, NOT THE EVENT. ⚠️ SAYING WHAT HAPPENS IN THE QUOTATION IS RETELLING. SAYING WHAT THE PARTICULAR WORDS DO IS ANALYSIS, AND THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE THE MARK SCHEME IS BUILT ON. ⭐ AND IF THE QUESTION REACHES FOR CONTEXT, REACH BACK THROUGH THE SAME QUOTATION. A line that carries an assumption of its period answers a context question and a language question at once, which is portability doing its job. ⚠️ THREE HABITS THAT COST MARKS HERE. ⚠️ THE FIRST IS QUOTING TO PROVE THE EVENT HAPPENED. Nobody doubts the event. The quotation is there to let you look at the words. ⚠️ THE SECOND IS THE LONG QUOTATION USED AS A SHIELD. Length can look like effort and it is mostly risk, since more words means more chances to be wrong about one. ⚠️ AND THE THIRD IS SAVING CONTEXT FOR A SEPARATE PARAGRAPH AT THE END. ⭐ CONTEXT BOLTED ON IS RARELY CREDITED; CONTEXT REACHED THROUGH A QUOTATION ALMOST ALWAYS IS. One last thing. If you are unsure whether to learn a line, ask what you would use it for. If the only answer is that it is famous, that is not a use.

Two revision lists, side by side

Two students revise the same novel for the same closed-book paper. Neither list is reproduced here in full, because the point is their shape rather than their contents. The first student has forty entries. They are the passages everybody agrees are important: the big set pieces, the turning points, the descriptions people quote in class. Most run to two or three lines. The list took a long time to build and looks impressive. The second student has eleven entries. Most are under six words. Several look trivial written down, and one is a single exclamation. ⚠️⚠️ IN THE EXAM THE FIRST STUDENT IS IN TROUBLE WITHIN TEN MINUTES, AND IT IS WORTH BEING PRECISE ABOUT WHY. ⭐ NOT BECAUSE THEY LEARNED THE WRONG PASSAGES. BECAUSE THEY LEARNED MORE THAN A PERSON CAN HOLD EXACTLY, AND THE LONGER SOMETHING IS, THE FASTER IT BLURS. What comes back is the sense of each passage and roughly the shape of it. And the sense of a passage cannot be put in inverted commas. So either they write it out approximately, which quietly changes the words their whole point depends on, or they describe it instead, which is retelling. The second student opens their bag and finds eleven things they can write out exactly. ⭐⭐ AND THE SECOND ADVANTAGE ONLY APPEARS ONCE THE PAPER IS TURNED OVER: THEIR ENTRIES BEND. The single exclamation can be used to talk about who the character is at the start. It can be used to talk about what the book thinks of a season and everything attached to it. It can be used to talk about how far somebody travels by the end, because a starting position is only visible if you have one. ⚠️ THE FIRST STUDENT'S BIG SET PIECES DO NOT BEND. THEY WERE FAMOUS FOR PROVING ONE THING, AND THEY PROVE THAT ONE THING. ⭐ SO THE SHORTER LIST COVERS MORE OF THE PAPER WHILE BEING A QUARTER OF THE SIZE, WHICH IS THE WHOLE ARGUMENT IN ONE SENTENCE. ⭐⭐ AND NOTICE WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THE WEEKS BEFORE: THE SECOND STUDENT FINISHED REVISING. THE FIRST ONE NEVER COULD HAVE, BECAUSE A COLLECTING TASK HAS NO END.

Order the way to pack

Put these six moves into the order that builds a small bag worth carrying into a closed-book exam.

Look through the novel for short lines rather than famous passages
Beside each one, write down the questions it could answer
Drop any line you cannot name at least two uses for
Check you can write each survivor out word for word from memory
Drop any that comes back approximately, however good it is
Stop once you own a dozen completely, rather than collecting more

Embed rather than announce

This is the shape of a sentence with a quotation woven into it. Assemble it.

Reaching context through the words

A candidate writes a strong paragraph analysing a quotation, then adds a separate final paragraph explaining what Victorian society was like. Why does the context paragraph earn little?

Because context bolted on sits beside the text rather than explaining it, and the credited move is reaching context through a quotation so that the same words answer both questions
Because Victorian context is not assessed on this component
Because the paragraph is too short to develop the point
Because examiners already know what Victorian society was like

The closed-book run

Five questions on choosing and using quotations. Three lives.

Complete the response facts

Weaving a quotation into your own sentence so that it reads as part of the argument is _____. What the period a text was written in assumed or expected, used to explain what the writing is doing, is _____. How the story is told, including who tells it and what they let the reader know, is _____. A reading of what a piece of writing means, which has to be supported rather than asserted, is an _____.

embedding context narrative method interpretation closed book quotation theme characterisation

Three revision plans to fix

Three students describe how they are preparing for this closed-book paper. None of them is lazy, and each plan has one thing wrong with it.

A student is learning forty quotations, most of them two or three lines long, and is falling behind. What would you change?
A student quotes accurately and then writes a sentence explaining what happens in the quotation. What is missing?
A student plans to write three analysis paragraphs and then one paragraph on Victorian context at the end. Is that the strongest plan?

Choose and defend three quotations

Take whichever 19th-century novel your class is studying. Choose THREE short quotations you would carry into a closed-book exam, and justify each one. You are being marked on the reasoning behind the choices, not on which lines you pick.

State the two properties a quotation needs to be worth carrying
Give your first quotation, and name at least two different questions it could answer
Give your second, and say what makes it short enough to be recalled exactly
Give your third, and say what it lets you say about how the story is told
Show one of them embedded in a sentence of your own rather than announced after a colon
Explain how one of your three could reach context, rather than context being added separately
Finish by saying which line you decided NOT to carry and why, even though it is a well-known one

The 19th-Century Novel: Reading and Response

Use it, the way the marks are given

What you'll cover