Commentary/Sight Passage - Help!

[ivyleaguegirl]

Okay so on Friday I have a commentary on a sight passage/prose. I'm in Year One and we just finished the book House of the Spirits, so the passage/prose will most likely be something related to HS. I'm having some trouble with English because i'm one of those people who takes hours to write anything. And doing a whole commentary in 90 - 120 minutes is a huge problem for me. Do you guys have suggestions to write better? I feel like my vocabulary is limited or it takes me forever to find the write word to make it sound good. I want to get at least a 6 in english!

[hehe101]

Hi!

First of all, if you know the commentary is most likely going to be House of the Spirits, make sure you have READ this book thoroughly and come up with potential themes. I'm sure your teacher must of told you something about what type of passages you will expect to see? The House of the Spirits is a great book for commentaries as you can talk about a load of different things like narration, metaphors, similes, etc. The book is loaded with it. And the themes are not very hard to understand. Of course make sure you get familiar with the idea of Magic Realism since that style of writing dominates the book. Trust me, once you actually read the book and understand it (there's a difference between reading something and actually understanding its themes. This may require you reading it more than once. I read House of the Spirits three times thanks to the commentaries and WL1.) you'll be a whole heck more confident going into the commentary.

My advice: Re-read the book if you feel like you didn't really read it before, look up the themes, try and find some common literary techniques the author uses to convey these themes and maybe just pick a random page out the book and see if you can do a practice commentary.

Commentaries are not hard if you prepare for them!