English Paper 2: Summarising or Not Giving Enough Info?

MightyMandarin

Hi, I'm having a little trouble with english p2 at the moment. Of the work I've handed up my teacher writes that I should stop 'summarising', which applies to poetry, macbeth and comparitive. However, from other essays I've handed up she asks me to go further into detail and explain what's going on. I'm quite confused as to, how much info is too much info? And are the examiners meant to act as if they've never studied the works or they have studied the works?

robman60

MightyMandarin wrote: »

Hi, I'm having a little trouble with english p2 at the moment. Of the work I've handed up my teacher writes that I should stop 'summarising', which applies to poetry, macbeth and comparitive. However, from other essays I've handed up she asks me to go further into detail and explain what's going on. I'm quite confused as to, how much info is too much info? And are the examiners meant to act as if they've never studied the works or they have studied the works?

If you're discussing a specific event, I find it's best to just give the main points from the incident you're referring to, and then give approximately twice as much personal input as summary. I stress that I only give a very brief outline of the incident as it's easy to write almost a page and only then you realise it's simply a summary filled with superfluous information.

Not attacking your teacher, but I've found those teachers who give contradictory advice like too little/too much summary tend to be clueless. It's a generalisation but I found that with two teachers I've had previously.

spurious

There's no need to summarise works. The examiners have read them.