C3 - Mega tips extended

 You have to be very perceptive when it comes to GENRE – you have to show the examiner that you understand that different genres follow different rules and conventions.

• The VERY FIRST thing that you need to do is to set yourself a mini-brief by detailing which features and conventions you are going to include. This is like the recipe/buying ingredients stage of baking a cake.
• If it gives you a really unusual genre, and there’s no way around it (ie, the other question is even worse) then you simply use your common sense.
• For example, write a section of a short story where a battle is taking place during a mass-war. Brutal imagery, clear enemy who we are supposed to dislike, semantic field of weapons and destruction, ß I have no idea if these ARE key conventions of the war-literature genre, but they certainly SOUND sensible to me, so I’m going to use them as my mini-brief. Now, I will feel a lot more confident in putting my writing together.
• THE SECOND thing that you do is to carefully put your piece of writing together, using all of the ingredients that you identified in the first process. But, the key thing here is DON’T RUSH IT. You have got LOTS of time to write a really good piece. You should make sure you read over every sentence to make sure it is worthwhile and that you are spelling/punctuating really well. MAKE SURE IT IS THE MOST PRECISE AND WELL PUT TOGETHER WRITING THAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF – that is literally what they are testing. ß this is like BAKING the cake.
• THE THIRD thing is the commentary. There is literally nothing to worry about here. There is no real set formula – although I will suggest one that has worked in the past. All you really have to remember is: What have you done? Where did you do it? (with terms) and Why did you do it?
• In terms of how many points you should write here – simple answer, as many as you can in the time you have left. If you do CRAVE a structure, as I know some of you do, then do something like this: 3-4 genre conventions 2-3 attitudes 2 more or so on things like purposes/sub-purposes of you writing/specific target audience/etc ß this section is like the bit on Bakeoff where Paul Hollywood goes round and asks you how you made your cake.