PAU Spanish Language and Literature II (Castilla-La Mancha) common mistakes
PAU Spanish Language and Literature II (Castilla-La Mancha) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Writing a summary that is a paraphrase of the whole text at nearly the same length, or a personal opinion paragraph instead of a summary.
Candidates confuse 'resumen' with 'comentario' and, under time pressure, copy sentences from the text or drift into evaluation because they have not identified the main thesis first.
What to do instead
Before writing, underline the main idea and the two or three supporting ideas; then close the text and write a single paragraph of roughly 60–80 words in your own words, third person, no quotes, no opinion, no examples. Check that the summary answers 'what does the text say?' and not 'what do I think?'.
Describing the structure as 'introduction, development, conclusion' without locating the lines or explaining the function of each part.
This is a memorised school formula that feels safe; candidates apply it mechanically without linking each part to the argumentative or narrative movement of the specific text.
What to do instead
Divide the text by content and give line references: e.g. 'lines 1–5: presentation of the thesis; lines 6–14: two arguments (examples); lines 15–20: conclusion and call to action'. Name the organising principle (cause–consequence, problem–solution, chronological, thesis–antithesis) and justify each division with a textual marker.
Identifying the theme with a single abstract noun ('love', 'death', 'freedom') and leaving it at that.
Candidates look for a topic label rather than a formulated idea, because they have not been taught to convert topic into thesis.
What to do instead
Write the theme as a full sentence that states what the text claims about the topic, e.g. 'the text denounces how nostalgia idealises a past that never existed'. Then verify it against the ending of the text, which usually confirms or reverses the initial idea.
In morphosyntactic analysis, labelling words by meaning rather than by distribution, e.g. calling 'que' a pronoun in every case, or calling a determiner an adjective.
Candidates rely on school grammar labels and on intuition; they do not test substitution, commutation or agreement, which are the reliable criteria.
What to do instead
Apply a fixed procedure for each word: substitution test (can it be replaced by 'el cual', 'eso', 'muy'?), agreement test, and function test (nucleus, modifier, complement). Practise the classic ambiguous cases: 'que' (relative pronoun / conjunction / intensifier), 'se' (reflexive, passive-reflexive, impersonal, pronoun of interest), 'lo' (article, pronoun, neuter).
Naming a rhetorical figure without explaining its effect on meaning, or mislabelling metonymy as metaphor and anaphora as repetition.
Candidates memorise a list of figures and try to spot them, but examiners reward the interpretation of the effect within the text's argument.
What to do instead
For every figure identified, add one clause linking it to meaning: 'the metaphor of the ship as a state reinforces the idea of a collective journey in crisis'. Learn the discriminating criteria: metaphor = substitution by similarity; metonymy = contiguity or cause–effect; anaphora = repetition at the start of successive clauses; parallelism = repeated syntactic structure.
Answering the applied grammar exercises by ear, without applying the requested transformation, or answering a different question than the one asked (e.g. explaining the rule when asked to rewrite the sentence).
Time pressure and habit: candidates read the first words of the instruction and produce what they know how to do, especially in tasks on passive voice, periphrasis or reported speech.
What to do instead
Read the instruction twice and underline the operative verb ('rewrite', 'transform', 'identify and classify', 'explain the function'). Then check the output against the instruction: if it says 'passive', the result must contain 'ser' + participle with the original agent preserved as 'por'. Keep the original tense and aspect unless told otherwise.
Reducing 20th–21st century literature to a list of names and dates, or attributing works to the wrong generation or movement (e.g. placing Lorca in the Generation of '98, or mixing Generation of '27 with the avant-garde isms).
Candidates revise from timelines and summaries rather than from works, so names float free of periods and features.
What to do instead
Build a grid with four columns per movement or generation: historical context, aesthetic principles, key authors, one representative work with a distinctive feature. Anchor each author with a single identifying trait (Lorca: popular tradition plus avant-garde metaphor; Cela: tremendismo; Martín Gaite: intimate narrative and female perspective) and practise matching fragments to authors by style, not by memory of titles.
Commenting a literary fragment by retelling its argument or plot, without analysing the literary construction (voice, perspective, time, space, metrics, genre features).
Candidates are more confident paraphrasing content than analysing form, and they fear making technical mistakes, so they avoid them.
What to do instead
Use a fixed checklist in this order: genre and subgenre, voice and narrator or speaker, addressee, time and space, structure, formal features (metrics, rhyme, stanza in poetry; narration versus dialogue in prose), then interpretation. Ensure at least half of the commentary addresses how the text is built, not what it says.
Writing an argumentative essay that is a list of disconnected opinions, with no thesis, no counter-argument and no conclusion that closes the argument.
Candidates treat the essay as free writing and run out of time to plan; they also confuse 'opinion' with 'argument'.
What to do instead
Spend five minutes planning: one sentence stating your position, two or three arguments each with evidence or example, one acknowledged counter-argument with a reply, and a conclusion that restates the position in new words. Use explicit connectors ('en primer lugar', 'sin embargo', 'en consecuencia', 'en definitiva') and keep one paragraph per idea.
Losing marks on register and correctness in the written production: colloquialisms, 'tú' in a formal essay, abbreviations, repeated vocabulary, and punctuation errors such as comma splices or missing accents.
Under time pressure candidates write as they speak and do not reserve time for revision; accent and punctuation rules are often the least practised.
What to do instead
Reserve the last five minutes for a targeted revision pass: accents on interrogatives and 'solo'/'aun' cases as required by the norm, agreement of subject and verb, pronoun reference, and register (replace 'mucho' with 'considerable', 'cosa' with a precise noun). Read the final paragraph aloud mentally to catch comma splices.