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 structure of this revision technique is inspired by a Youtube series by Cambridge medical student Ali Abdaal. He runs through a method he used for memorising neuroscience in medical school, and although it’s not perfectly applicable to the relatively minuscule task of IGCSE English, we think it’s still relevant. I’ve simplified and modified this technique to be specifically applicable to iGCSE, and this new is the basis of this post. Here’s a link to that: Ali Abdaal’s Youtube Video

This post is the second half of a two parter on the IGCSE Literature Seen Essay, which in turn is part of a greater series on smashing IGCSE Lit as a whole. I’d recommend reading the first article before this one, although that’s not necessary.

2a. Active Recall: Anki Flashcards

Anki is a flashcard app designed by medical students(they’re geniuses) to help with memorisation through active recall and space repetition. If you’re revising at all, you’re likely already do this in some form.

• Active recall refers to when active effort is put into remembering(recalling) anything

  • For instance, every time you try to guess the back of a flashcard, or every time you conjure up an equation for maths, that’s active recall

• Spaced repetition is drilling concepts into your head through repeated practice spread out across time

  • Maybe you test your Physics equations once a week or so. Maybe you revise your verb conjugations every day. This sort of repetition, over time, is known as spaced repetition

How Anki is different from most flashcards app is its minute, science-based protocol which has been shown time and time again to be effective in helping students memorise. Here’s what makes Anki better:

• It spaces out when you see certain cards depending on how strong you feel at them, instead of just drilling you on each one equally. Thus, it prioritises the topic areas that are the hardest for you, rather than equally distributing your practice

  • This is the key-it might seem tiny, but this is the key features that makes Anki work

• It allows for a lot more malleability than other flashcard apps. There are lots of different card types that can all come into play

• It’s a lot more customisable, allowing for templates and themes and etc

Here’s how to use Anki in combination with the Seen Essay writing strategy from the previous article

• Memorise blocks from every single essay you have written

  • This is described briefly in Abdaal’s video, but the idea is you write down the key points of each essay in the back of your Anki flashcards, and you write down an identifying keyword on the front

  • The idea behind this is to get the main blocks of the most common essays that might occur in an exam memorised

    • Even if a unanticipated essay comes up on an exam, you will still be able to include blocks of knowledge that you have already studied on it

• Make sure you always do Anki

  • If you log onto Anki and practice on a daily basis, there is a really high chance the information you receive will be fully absorbed into your brain

  • You have to build a habit of going onto Anki, or it won’t be nearly as effective

• Include quotes in your Anki flashcards

  • So you’re not just memorising the points that you might make, but also the quotes themselves

2b. Spider Diagrams

Spider Diagrams are a brilliant way to practice essay writing strategies in a short amount of time. You’re not writing a full essay, instead sort of imagining what you would say in an exam scenario, thus getting a lot of value from your time.

• Plan spider diagrams for every single essay that could possibly come up

  • Get questions from past papers, and then plot out a response on spider diagrams, utlising the blocks of essays you’ve memorised already to compose a response

• I’ve listed tips on how to prepare essays in the last article, and I’d recommend using that as a guide to this.