What's the best way to practice for HL English final exams?

[ohkay]

Hello,

I'm new to this whole website so I'm not really sure how it works here.

But anyways, I've got a question: What's the best way to practice analysing, comparing and contrasting two texts?

Recently I realised that I have this issue with me where I'm not able to think quickly or make sense when I write on paper (my sentences are always jumbled up, disorganised). I perform great with assessment tasks but writing is a bit of difficulty. Conventionally, I use my laptop to write the answers to the questions then transfer it to my paper, however I won't be allowed to do this during the actual exams, thus I'm quite nervous about my ability to perform an excellent result. So my only option is to start practicing from now, I want to be able to get used to it and hopefully improve by the end of next year, I just need some tips on improvement (maybe some past papers I can download to practice on them), so I was hoping if you guys could help me  thanks!

[Nomenclature]

First off, there's a lot of great posts/strategies pinned in threads on the Languages A Literature subform.

Second, I'm assuming your asking this because of paper 2. You'll do practice in class I assume, so you'll get use to the format. I actually "pre-wrote" my paper 2 and it worked well for me. Pick maybe 3 or 4 possible works and just think about some possibilities. Given that they give you a lot of prompts, with some subtle changes you can adapt from prompts in prior years and write your essay around that. You don't have to know quotes, just know events, general style, etc.

As for the nitty gritty of compare/contrast, I've always thought that you can do well by picking ostensibly opposed things for comparison and seemingly similar things for contrast. A pretty common strategy, if you will, is to point out some similarities, and then analyze personification, plotting, etc. and point how the themes diverge and are quite different.