In this five part series, I’m going to show you how to ace your Cambridge IGCSE World Literature Course, taking you through everything teachers don’t show you. I promise you that IGCSE English is a course with incredibly limited scope, and it’s easy to manipulate this to your advantage and score high marks with ease. It always tackles the same themes, looks for the same things in your writings, and it’s acknowledging this will help you

So far, we’ve taken a look at the Unseen Paper. This article will explain how to approach the Seen Paper in a way that guarantees success.

The seen paper is infamous as a magnet for the ire of ambitious IGCSE English students. But why is this the case? What is it about the seen paper that induces so much more pain and anger than the rest of the IGCSE Literature Syllabus?

Here are a few potential answers.

• We are used to analysing small texts such as poems, or individual scenes, because it’s the way we were taught analysis in Years 7 to 9. When we finally get to essays intended to asses our understanding of an entire extended text, we struggle

  • One reason we struggle is because comprehending a whole text can be quite difficult- there are so many intertwining characters and themes that it can be hard to separate and process

  • Another could be the memorisation and preparation for such a broad topics

• The seen paper appears superficially to require a lot more memorisation, particularly for quotations, than the unseen paper

• The seen paper is unpredictable and has a ton of different potential questions

As a student, I too struggled with a lot of these issues, and was never able to fully realise a solution to them. Honestly, the IGCSE Exams being cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic might have actually helped my grade, because I wasn’t at all prepared for the Seen paper. That being said, I’ve done some extensive research into the topic, and based off of this, along with my personal experience, I present to you in this article a 3 step plan to success.

1. Write essays for the most likely questions

   • Figure out what the most likely questions are

     • Analyse and look through a ton of historical past papers to assess what’s asked about, and understand why

     • Although we’re not writing essays for every possible question, knowing the main chunks of what we are meant to be aware of will help in every possible scenario

   • Prepare a list of these likely questions

   • Write the essays for these questions

     • The trick to writing seen essays

2. Rhythmically embed these essays in your brain through memorisation

   • This step really isn’t as boring as it sounds. Instead of going all out and cramming in one go(which doesn’t really work), we modify a method developed by education expert Ali Abdaal to the IGCSE Curriculum

3. Writing a Perfect IGCSE Literature Seen Essay

1a. Figure Out What the Most Likely Questions Are

Let’s first unpack the common questions that Seen Papers tend to ask, and what they’re really asking you to do.

• Extract-based questions

  • These questions look something all come with a larger extract from your set text, and are phrased along the lines of this:

    • In what ways does Kolatkar strikingly convey the journey on the bus?

    • How does Winton vividly convey the narrator’s thoughts and feelings in this opening to the story?

    • Explore the ways in which Ibsen makes this such a dramatic and significant moment in the play.

    • How does Franklin vividly convey Sybylla’s thoughts and feelings at this moment in the novel?

    • In what ways does Brecht make this conversation between Grusha and Simon such a memorable moment in the play?

      • This is an example of a question that is extract-based but also asks you to describe a character relationship

  • Note the emphasis on “moments”. These questions are asking you to place an extract within the context of an entire story, and thus make references to the themes and characters of the entire story, not just the individual moments

    • Also, you might notice an emphasis on “significance”- again asking for a wider understanding of the text

• Character-based questions

  • These questions, generally a sentence long, ask for you to describe what role characters serve in the greater text

    • To what extent do you think Ibsen’s portrayal of Krogstad makes him a dislikeable character?

    • What vivid impressions of Harold Beecham does Franklin’s writing create for you?

    • How far does Dangarembga’s portrayal of Babamukuru make you feel sorry for him?

• Theme-based questions

  • These are less common than both the extract questions and the character based questions

    • Explore the ways in which Brecht strikingly portrays corruption in the play

    • In what ways does Dangarembga powerfully convey the conflict between generations in the novel?

    • In what ways do the poets powerfully convey ideas about change in Touch and Go (by Stevie Smith) andSong (by George Szirtes)?

Alright, now we can see that the emphasis tends to be on significant scenes, characters, and plays. A key mistake that IGCSE students tend to make(me included) is writing essays that analyse scenes on their own, or one character on their own, ignoring the wider context of the story at hand.

1b. Prepare a List of These Likely Questions

The first thing you’re going to have to do is prepare a list of the most common potential topics that can come up- I recommend somewhere between 5-15 questions(depending on how much time you’re willing to put in).

You can find a list of important themes and characters in Sparknotes.com, like I did for a Doll’s House. What’s especially nice about Sparknotes is theres an option to view quotations by theme. Here’s my list for a Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen:

• Nora Helmer

• Torvald Helmer

• Krogstad

• Mrs. Linde

• Dr. Rank

• Gender roles

• Reputation

• Deceit

1c. Write the Essays for These Questions

I’m not going to pretend I’m some expert on writing essays- if you need a lot of help, you can always ask your English teacher. But I can provide some quick tips that might help you along the way, especially with the way these questions are formatted.

1. See the bigger picture

   • Reference the entire text

2. Read up on societal, performance and authorial context

   • I’ve separated the three because that’s how important I think these are

   • Societal context refers to the context of society at the time

     • For example, a Doll’s House was written at the peak of Collectivism in Scandinavia, at the time right before Janteloven was written down. It was also when Norway was going through an economic boom

   • What I’ve called “performance context” refers to the way a story was read, or watched, or listened to

     • Shakespeare’s plays were commonly watched and talked about by common people, almost like blockbuster films today. The audience was primarily lower class drunk men. Female characters were played by male actors at the time

   • Authorial context is what the author was going through in their personal life at the time of writing

     • A Doll’s House was based off a true story that Henrik Ibsen recounted. The only major change he made was the ending. In real life, the equivalent of Nora got sent off to a mental asylum.

3. Flourish!

   • Add lots of pretty words, polysyllabic preferably.

4. Use medium-specific techniques, or signature techniques of the author/poet/playwright

   • I talk briefly about this in the unseen poetry article, but you can demonstrate your understanding of literature as a whole by focusing in one specific medium and honing your understanding of the techniques used in that one medium.

     • Here’s a list of specific techniques for plays

     • Here’s a very long of poetical techniques, and a shorter one too

     • And one for prose!

   • Signature techniques for a specific author refers to something like iambic pentameter, which is famous for its use by Shakespeare.