Getting a grade 9 is not intellectually difficult. (There are dozens of grade 9 ideas in my guide, and multiple essays).
Every year, dozens of students who were getting grades 4, 5 and 6 in their mocks write to me to say they got a grade 9 in the real exam.
We might think that it is only grade 7 and 8 students who would get to a 9. We imagine it is like running – in order to run a 4 minute mile, we must first learn to run a 4 minute and 15 second mile, and before that a 4 minute and 30 second mile.
We can’t just go from running a 5 minute mile to a 4 minute mile. It is just humanly impossible. Running is like that.
Essay writing is not like running.
Grade 9 students do these 6 things:
Memorise a few of the writer’s ideas
Memorise some context of the time (but only to write about the writer’s ideas)
Memorise a few key quotes, and what you want to write about them, linking these to the writer’s ideas
Memorise what you want to write about the beginning and ending of the text, as these will be relevant to every essay.
Write a thesis statement which shows what you are going to argue in the essay.
Write a conclusion.
Now, a lot of grade 9 students do a lot more than this, but this minimum standard will get you to grade 9. And, if you ‘fail’, you will still get grade 8.
Is There A Reason Not to Do This, Or Just an Excuse?
Ok, so pick an average student in your class. If they had a page or two of A4, with all those things typed up neatly for them, could they remember it? (It doesn’t have to be word for word – even quotes get full marks if they quoted incorrectly in the exam).
They could, right? You could.
The person in your class who couldn’t do that is the lazy one. It might be that they just don’t believe they can do it, that they lack confidence, that they are anxious about the exam. But these are excuses, not reasons. They are true, but only so far as the student believes they are true.
The easiest way to change that belief is to identify the knowledge, and then quiz yourself on it. You’ll find that you quickly learn it. Once you see that, you will suddenly get confidence, you will suddenly feel less anxious.
You will start to believe.
The ONE THING all 30/30 Students Do
There is one other thing. It might be the most important. Write as fast as you can. Most grade 9 answers are over 900 words long.
Why? Genius students learn to use the right words to say as much as possible. They can smash out a 700 word answer that covers everything.
But guess what, most grade 9 students are not genius students! They just learn the right stuff, and splurge it out on the page as quickly as they can.
This is why I am going to show you an essay which, in the exam, was 912 words long.
Once I have rewritten it, with exactly the same methods, quotes, references, ideas etc, but without the waffle, it is 645 words long.
This student is not a genius. They are not a particularly good writer. Yet they scored not just a grade 9, but 30 out of 30, 100%.
What You Will Learn From Reading the Essay
Ok, let’s find out how they did it so you can do the same. It is about Romeo and Juliet. If you haven’t studied that play, you will still see exactly how to write a full mark essay. It will totally make sense to you.
If you choose not to read it because you haven’t studied the play, that is an excuse. It is not a reason!
Examiner Comments
The essay begins with a strong thesis statement
Because it shows that the interpretation of the lover’s love depends on understanding the context at the time
Which means this is a conceptualised start
And the thesis also provides a plan for the rest of the essay
Which sets out to prove the argument made in the first sentence
The explanation of the imagery of light is analytical
Because it is linked to Shakespeare’s ideas
The student uses many references from different parts of the text
And they are used to construct an argument about Shakespeare’s ideas
The essay combines the themes of love and violence very well
And this makes the essay convincing
See – most of the skills the examiner is looking for are about how to write an essay and the comments would be the same on any full mark answer to any text.
This was the extract (you don’t have to read it to understand the essay)
SCENE II. Capulet’s Garden.
Enter Romeo.
ROMEO.
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
Juliet appears above at a window.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.
I am too bold, ’tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek.
JULIET.
Ay me.
ROMEO.
She speaks.
O speak again bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
This was the question
How does Shakespeare present Romeo’s love in this extract and the play as a whole?
The Essay
Shakespeare portrays Romeo’s love for Juliet as all-consuming, unpredictable, brief and ultimately destructive, consuming all who are exposed to it in violence and death.
Yes, this is a good thesis statement.
It contains lots of interpretations of Romeo’s love.
But, it would have been even better if the student said why Shakespeare portrays Romeo’s love this way. Example:
Is it a celebration of love and a criticism of the patriarchal, violent society which meant it couldn’t flourish?
Or is it a cautionary tale to parents, portraying the naïve and sexually obsessed risk taking of their teenage children, urging them to pay more attention to threat they pose to family stability?
Now, how long would it take you to memorise both of those questions? 10 minutes? That’s a thesis statement beyond grade 9, which you could take into any exam question. It just isn’t that hard.
This is also a model of how you can write and memorise a thesis statement to any of your texts – find two different interpretations of the writer’s main ideas.
The extract repeatedly references light in order to suggest Romeo’s love is blinding. He feels “Juliet is the sun”, and the semantic field develops with “fairest stars” and “twinkle”, constant references to light. This implies that Romeo is blinded to the consequences of his love, believing that love will help him overcome all obstacles.
Ok, starting with the extract is more difficult if you want full marks, because you need to develop a convincing argument. Here it is that Romeo’s love is blind, naive and destructive.
I always recommend going through the play chronologically instead, as it is much easier to build an argument.
For example, we can examine the “saint seducing gold” which Romeo’s love for Rosaline was simply a way to buy her sexual favours. This would exactly match this student’s argument, wouldn’t it?
Also, you would barely have to do any thinking – you start at the beginning and what you want to argue is just obvious. It will also fit any and every essay about Romeo.
Starting with the extract makes it harder to write that argument. It makes the exam harder for you to do. But, if you want to start with the extract, and make it harder – this is how to do it. Normally.
Why did this student find it a good method, even though they are not a genius? They got lucky. They were able to use the extract as the beginning, and the later references to the text could then move in chronological order, apart from one brief mention of Rosaline.
He also uses imagery of light to describe Juliet’s angelic characteristics as a heavenly body. This angelic imagery is picked up by Luhrmann in his film of the play, portraying Juliet in this scene with angelic wings. Shakespeare uses this angelic purity now so that her final death is jarring. Placing his love for Juliet on this pedestal feels romantic. But it also makes that love out of reach. His love is an unreachable ideal.
Notice that the examiner makes no comment about the Luhrmann reference. This is because it just as likely to lead to a student writing something which gets no marks. For example, if the sentence: “This angelic imagery is picked up by Luhrmann in his film of the play, portraying Juliet in this scene with angelic wings” was not in the paragraph, it would earn exactly the same marks.
But, imagine how tempting it would have been to carry on writing about the film! So, avoid this.
The analysis of the imagery, and its symbolism in the text itself is what earned the marks.
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When he compares Juliet to “the fairest stars” we can see that he is blind to reality. We know stars are simply balls of gas, without human emotion. We pity Romeo from the prologue onwards, as we know his love is out of reach, and his love for Juliet blinds him to this fact.
The interpretations of a contemporary audience are treated as context for AO3. But you have to acknowledge that this perspective is different.
For example, “A modern audience might feel that Romeo’s romantic view of the stars is self-delusion, because we all know they are emotionless balls of gasses. However, a contemporary audience would see this reference as Romeo’s blindness to the power of his fate, which he can’t escape.”
See the difference?
Personally (because you can only write so much in exam conditions) I feel you get much more marks for the second sentence than the first. Much easier to explain the views of the contemporary audience.
Also, that’s who Shakespeare was writing for, so that has to be the more interesting perspective.
We can see many of Romeo’s emotions change in an instant during the play, so we suspect his love of Juliet will follow the same pattern. Consequently, we remember that in Act 1 he doesn’t just compare Juliet to the “sun”, he used the same imagery to describe Rosaline. Describing Juliet as “the all-seeing sun” is no longer a purely romantic act, it exposes the superficiality of his love. We assume his love is shallow, as it is so quick to transfer to Juliet from Rosaline.
Ok, here I go again with my chronological order. This is a great argument. But, it leads perfectly into Romeo’s words about Juliet, comparing her to the sun, not having her before Rosaline.
So it would have been more powerful placed before the analysis of the extract.
And it also depends on the student remembering that Romeo compared Rosaline to the sun*. It took both luck and thought. But, I made exactly the same point with ‘saint seducing gold’ – this took zero thought. Because, like you should, I just memorised a few key quotes which I know will be relevant to many essays.
For example, it fits an essay on masculinity, on love, on Romeo, on Juliet. I can link it to Capulet – after all he is selling his daughter to the highest bidder, Paris. I can link it to Lady Capulet who has been sold at 13 to be a wife by her father (because she had already given birth to Juliet at Juliet’s age).
See, I can answer any essay, with no thought. I’ve already used that thought in my revision.
*Now, remember when the student said that Romeo compared Rosaline to the sun? Not so. He actually said “the all seeing sun / ne’er saw her match”. In other words, the sun, which like God has been around since the dawn of time, has never seen anyone as beautiful as Rosaline.
See what I mean? The student got lucky: they were wrong, and the senior examiner didn’t spot it, or didn’t care.
Romeo is self-absorbed elsewhere in the play. He rejects the Friar’s advice, claiming “thou canst not speak of that which thou dost not feel”. Dominic Dromgoole’s staging of the play had Romeo weeping on the ground after murdering Tybalt, implying that this self-absorption is a dominant part of Romeo’s character.
Well, we’re English teachers. We all love a student who has actually gone to the theatre and thought deeply about the play. Our kind of people. But, does it get extra marks? No. The examiner doesn’t even mention it. The student could equally have said, “Romeo’s vanity and immature belief that only he can have experienced this kind of love, and that an older man who has devoted his entire life to the love of God, has no empathy for his feelings is intended to be ridiculous”.
That would have been an even better argument.
The Friar also implies that Romeo’s love for Juliet is not sincere, but narcissistic. Romeo is in love with the image of himself as a lover. So the Friar observes, “young men's love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes”. We realise that Romeo’s love is fickle and so we are partly satisfied with the tragic ending which is a fitting consequence to his actions.
Now we are talking. This is exactly the sort of paragraph you can memorise in advance. You know it will be relevant to so many essays – exactly like the example earlier.
Even to an essay on Lady Capulet (which, by the way, is very unlikely to come up).
So, you would use it to show that Capulet never loved her, and was attracted only in her physical beauty and youth, and perhaps that, being so young, she would feel intimidated in refusing him anything.
Shakespeare also portrays Romeo’s love as the cause of death and violence. We can see this in Juliet’s final words before her suicide. Shakespeare portrays her decision as though his love has duped her, which is why we get the contradictions of “happy dagger” and “O loving hate”. These shocking oxymorons reveal that Romeo’s unreasonable love is the cause of her violent death.
I’m still excited. This is another of those memorable pre-prepared paragraphs. Can you think of any essay where writing about the ending is not relevant?
I hope not – because it is 100% relevant to any conclusion. It is where we discover the writer’s final point of view.
This happens 100% of the time, with any text you ever study, including the poems.
And, as you are forced to write about the writer’s perspective when writing about the ending, you always get a very high mark.
Romeo also claims that Juliet prevented him from being his true, violent self, stating her “beauty hath made [him] effeminate”. This is the moment that he chooses to kill Tybalt, and so we see that he justifies his violence out of love for Juliet, and this desire for love finally leads to their tragic deaths. We no longer view their love as romantically pure, but rather toxic and built upon violence. We can see that violence and death follow the lovers, and we attribute this to Romeo’s love for Juliet.
I hope that this has also been prepared in advance. It would make better sense before the ‘happy dagger’, as this would make the argument chronological.
You could write a beyond grade 9 reason why Juliet, infected by a patriarchal society, takes on Romeo’s violence as proof of love. And this leads to her mistaken belief that only the ultimate act of violence, erasing herself, will be proof of her love in a patriarchal world that values violence so highly.
My point is, it is easy to develop above grade 9 or grade 9 ideas in pre-prepared paragraphs. Memorise them – the gist and vocabulary – you don’t need to be word for word – and getting the grade is almost inevitable.
Once again, it fits any essay title – even one on Lady Capulet. We can argue that she refuses to support Juliet because of the threat of male violence, when she tells Capulet “you are too hot”. Or, link it to how she embraces the thought of assassinating Romeo with poison, the ‘unaccustomed dram’ she plans to kill him with.
To conclude, Shakespeare’s portrayal of love acting hand in hand with violence is relevant even now, where we live with rising cases of abuse in the home. The abuser often believes they love their victim, yet we can see that the price of love is its ability to change to sudden violence.
We can see how Romeo’s love has blinded both lovers, because its tragic and fickle consequences arrive so quickly that the lovers do not see them coming.
A good conclusion doesn’t just repeat what the essay has already shown, it also looks outwards, to other questions, or other interpretations. Here, the student thinks about how the play is still relevant today.
AQA senior examiners love this, because they believe that any text is not just relevant to the time it was written. They believe that it is relevant because it describes the human condition, the part of us that is timeless, and always true, no matter when we were born.
That is one way of looking at the purpose of literature. Personally, I like to question this – is the abuse a result of the human condition (and therefore always going to be prominent) or is it a patriarchal problem, and therefore open to change if we change society?
To suggest that the problems of violence Juliet faced in her society, compared to what women face in Europe in the modern age is, to me, a ridiculous argument.
Luckily for all of us, that doesn’t matter.
The conclusion has done its job, linking to a further a question, which here is the parallel with modern society. It gets full marks.
Rereading the comments referring to the adaptations, I can see why an examiner might have just ignored them entirely. Neither do much to support the student’s main arguments.
But I think engaging with adaptations can lead to more insightful interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays and just wonder whether or not it’s worth referring to film adaptations in a GCSE essay period?
Don’t you think this student’s comments on the adaptations should have gained credit?
Surely these kind of comments fall under AO3? The student is not confusing adaptations with the play but commenting on how others have interpreted the characters within the play in a critical way.