If that sounds familiar, the problem may not be that you need to know your text better.

In fact, students consistently achieving Merit often know their texts very well.

The shift towards Excellence is frequently about something quite different:

Stop building your essay around the text. Start building it around the question.

Your text isn't your argument.

This can feel like a strange idea at first. After all, you've spent weeks studying a novel, film, poem or play. Surely the essay is supposed to demonstrate how much you know about it? Yes—but that's not quite the same thing as making the text the subject of your argument.

Imagine you've studied a novel and are asked a question about how setting reveals character.

It's tempting to plan like this:

Paragraph 1: The house

Paragraph 2: The bush

Paragraph 3: The town

You've got quotations for each setting. You know which techniques the writer uses. You're ready to go.

But there's a problem.

You're answering a question that you’ve invented, rather than the question you've actually been given.

The real thinking needs to happen before you decide what your paragraphs will contain.

Spend longer on the question

Students are often understandably eager to get writing.

I'd rather you spent some of that time thinking.

Look carefully at the important words in the question. Don't assume you know exactly what they mean:

• If the question asks you to analyse, what is it actually asking you to do?

• If it asks how something helped you understand a character, what does understand mean -

• Know more facts about them?

• Understand their motivation?

• Recognise something they don't recognise about themselves?

• See how their environment has shaped them?

• Feel differently towards them?

One apparently ordinary word can take you in several different directions. That's where your argument starts.

Then decide what you actually think

Before you start hunting through your mental filing cabinet for quotations, answer the question.

Not:

What happened in the text?

Not:

What techniques did the writer use?

But:

What do I think about the idea this question is asking me to consider?

This is your stance, And you should be able to express it clearly.

Let's move away from literature for a moment. Imagine the statement you're responding to is:

"No one watches women's sport."

You could immediately start collecting examples of women's sport.

But don't. First, interrogate the statement.

• What does no one mean?

• What does watches mean?

• Which sports?

• Where?

• At what point in history?

• Who has had the opportunity to watch?

• Who might be making this claim—and what assumptions might sit behind it?

Now you can arrive at a stance:

People want to watch women's sport. They simply haven't been given the same opportunities to do so.

That's an argument.

Now you need to prove it.

Your paragraphs are reasons why your stance is true. Instead of asking:

What three things from my text can I write about?

ask:

Why do I think my stance is true?

For our women's sport example, you might brainstorm:

1. People can't choose to watch something that isn't available to them.

Women's sport has historically received much less broadcasting and publicity than men's sport.

2. Women haven't always had equal opportunities even to play.

People can’t watch what isn’t allowed to exist.

3. Opportunity affects the standard of sport, too.

If generations of girls have fewer opportunities, poorer facilities, less coaching and fewer pathways into elite competition, we can't reasonably treat differences in performance as evidence of differences in potential.

4. When women's sport is visible and accessible, audiences do turn up.

There’s an appetite for women’s sport which shows in crowds.

5. Even "no one" deserves analysis.

Who is being imagined when someone says nobody wants to watch women's sport? Girls and women may see something quite different in elite female athletes: people who look like them being powerful, skilful, competitive and successful.

Notice what has happened.

We haven't organised our thinking around five sporting examples.

We've developed five reasons why our stance is true.

The evidence now has a job to do: prove our argument.

For example, for #2 (Women haven't always had equal opportunities even to play.)  I might use:

 In England, women's football had become remarkably popular by the early twentieth century. Some matches attracted tens of thousands of spectators. Then, in 1921, the Football Association prohibited women's football from being played on the grounds of its affiliated clubs. The restriction marginalised the game for nearly 50 years.

For #4 (When women's sport is visible and accessible, audiences do turn up.)my evidence might be:

New Zealand provides a wonderful example. The 2021 Rugby World Cup, played in 2022, attracted 150,179 spectators across the tournament, and 42,579 watched the Black Ferns beat England in the final at Eden Park—a then-record crowd for a women's international rugby match.

Back to NCEA English…

This is exactly what I want you to do with your English text. Once you've established your stance, ask:

What are my strongest reasons for believing this?

Those reasons become the foundations of your paragraphs.

Only then do you go back to your knowledge of the text and ask questions like:

·         Which event supports this reason?

·         Which quotation demonstrates it?

·         Which technique helps the writer communicate it?

·         Which character provides a complication or contrast?

The text hasn't become less important.

In fact, knowing it really well gives you an enormous advantage.

But instead of allowing the text to dictate what you say, you're selecting evidence from it to prove something you have decided is worth saying.

That's a much more sophisticated relationship with the text.

State your stance

Don't make your marker hunt for your argument. By the end of your introduction, they should know what you think. Then each paragraph gives them another reason to believe you.That means your essay begins to have momentum:

• Here's what I think.

• Here's one reason it's true.

• Here's another.

• And here's another—and look at what this allows us to understand beyond the obvious reading of the text.

You're no longer taking your marker on a guided tour through the novel. You're making a case.

What does Excellence thinking look like?

There's no magic sentence structure that turns Merit into Excellence, and there shouldn't be. But one of the most useful shifts you can make is this:

That's why knowing more quotations isn't necessarily the answer when you're already consistently achieving Merit.

You may already have the evidence you need.

The next step is deciding what you want that evidence to prove.

Stuck at Merit?

If you already know your text, have the quotations and understand the techniques, another set of notes may not be what you need.

Sometimes you need someone to help you change how you're thinking about the question.

That's the work I do with senior secondary students: helping you understand what's keeping your writing at its current level, and giving you practical ways to move it forward—without writing the essay for you.

Find out about academic writing coaching →