PAU Spanish Language and Literature II (Extremadura) common mistakes
PAU Spanish Language and Literature II (Extremadura) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Writing the summary (resumen) as a paragraph-by-paragraph retelling that copies whole clauses from the text, so the result is nearly as long as the original and includes the candidate's own opinion.
Candidates confuse 'summarise' with 'reproduce' and, under time pressure, lift sentences verbatim because it feels safer than reformulating. They also import value judgements because the text invites them.
What to do instead
Train a strict protocol: identify the text's thesis and its 3–4 supporting moves, then write 4–6 sentences of 60–90 words total, all in your own words, with no adjectives of opinion and no quoted fragments longer than three words. Before copying anything, ask 'is this the idea or the wording?' and rewrite the idea. Practise condensing a 400-word article into 70 words and check the count.
Identifying the communicative situation only as 'it is an informative text' without naming the concrete emitter, addressee, channel, register and function, and without linking these to textual marks.
Candidates memorise labels (informativo, persuasivo, literario) as a checklist and do not realise the question asks them to justify each label with evidence from the text.
What to do instead
Use a fixed five-slot grid - emitter, addressee, channel/medium, register, dominant function - and force yourself to attach one short quotation or feature to each slot (e.g. first-person plural 'debemos' signals an emitter addressing a collective addressee; conditional and evaluative adjectives signal persuasive intent). If a slot has no textual anchor, say so explicitly rather than inventing it.
Describing the structure as 'introduction, development, conclusion' with line numbers but without stating the organising criterion or the function of each part in the argument.
This is the formula learned in secondary school and it is safe; candidates fear that proposing an alternative partition (e.g. thesis–antithesis–synthesis, or problem–causes–solutions) may be marked wrong.
What to do instead
Always announce the criterion first ('I divide the text according to its argumentative progression'), then for each part give its content in one clause and its function ('sets up the problem', 'anticipates the objection', 'closes with a call to action'). Where the text is literary, use narrative or poetic criteria (framing, temporal rupture, turn/volta). Justify boundaries with a quoted connector or a change of tense/person.
Treating the prescribed reading as a plot summary: retelling what happens to the characters and then adding a vague sentence about 'the theme of love and death', without genre, period, narrator or stylistic analysis.
Candidates often rely on a plot synopsis found online or on a first reading, and have not built a mental grid linking work, author, generation, genre and technique.
What to do instead
Prepare a one-page card per prescribed work with fixed headings: genre and subgenre, period and movement, author's place in literary history, central themes with a concrete scene as evidence, characters and their function, narrative voice and focalisation (or poetic voice), time and space, three stylistic features with a short quotation each. In the exam, answer by moving through those headings rather than through the plot.
Naming a stylistic device without explaining its effect, e.g. 'there are metaphors and anaphora' or 'the author uses short sentences', and then stopping.
Candidates learn a list of figures and believe identification earns the mark; they have not practised the second half of the operation, which is interpretation.
What to do instead
Use a three-step formula for every device: name it, quote it (three to six words), then state its function in this text ('the anaphora of "no" accumulates negation and produces a sense of paralysis that supports the theme of disillusion'). Never list more than four or five devices; depth scores better than inventory.
Writing the argumentative essay as a personal confession or a stream of opinions ('I think that nowadays young people...') with no thesis, no structure and no reference to the text that prompted the question.
The prompt usually touches on a contemporary issue and candidates respond conversationally, forgetting that the task is assessed for textual competence: coherence, cohesion, adequacy and correctness.
What to do instead
Plan two minutes before writing: state a defensible thesis in one sentence, outline two or three arguments with one example each, and decide the conclusion. Open with a framing sentence that connects to the text studied, use explicit connectors (por un lado, sin embargo, en consecuencia, en definitiva), and keep register formal: no contractions, no 'yo creo que' as the backbone. Reserve three minutes to revise agreement, accents and punctuation.
Confusing grammatical categories and functions in the language-reflection questions: calling a subordinate clause a 'complemento directo', labelling 'que' always as a relative pronoun, or calling a prepositional phrase a noun phrase.
Candidates mix syntactic function (what the unit does in the sentence) with category (what kind of unit it is), and 'que' is taught loosely as a single word rather than as several homographs.
What to do instead
Apply two separate questions to any segment: what is it (category) and what does it do (function)? For 'que', test substitution: if it can be replaced by 'el cual/la cual' and has an antecedent, it is a relative pronoun; if it introduces a clause that can be replaced by 'eso' and depends on a verb of saying or thinking, it is a conjunction; if it is accented and exclamative or interrogative, it is a stressed quantifier or interrogative. Practise with sentences containing all three in one line.
Analysing lexical cohesion only by listing repeated words, ignoring synonymy, antonymy, hyperonymy, lexical chains and the function of connectors in the text.
Repetition is the easiest phenomenon to spot, so candidates stop there; they have not been trained to trace how a text builds a topic through a chain of related words.
What to do instead
Map the text: underline the words belonging to the same semantic field, group them into two or three lexical chains, and show how each chain advances the theme. Then classify connectors by function (addition, contrast, cause, consequence, reformulation, exemplification) and comment on the effect of switching between them. One well-traced chain is worth more than ten isolated observations.
Placing authors and movements in the wrong period or attributing them to the wrong generation, for example putting García Lorca in the Generation of '98, treating the Generation of '27 as a prose movement, or dating the novela social of the 1950s to the post-1975 period.
Literary history is studied as a list of names and dates without a timeline, and movements overlap (the '27 poets are active into the 1930s; the Generation of '98 and modernism coexist).
What to do instead
Build a single timeline from 1898 to the present with, for each entry, a marker event, two representative authors, one representative work and one defining feature. Anchor the tricky overlaps explicitly: '98 = crisis of 1898, prose of reflection, Unamuno and Baroja; '27 = poetic generation, avant-garde and popular tradition, Lorca, Alberti, Guillén; post-war: tremendismo and social novel in the 1940s–50s, experimental novel in the 1960s, and the return to story-telling after 1975.
Answering the literary-history question with a generic paragraph about 'the importance of literature' or a biography of the author, instead of naming the movement's defining features with authors and works.
Candidates run out of time and write filler, or they know the author's life better than the poetics of the movement, so biography substitutes for analysis.
What to do instead
Prepare a three-line template per movement - defining features, two or three authors with one work each, one stylistic marker - and answer within that template. Cut any sentence that would remain true if the movement's name were changed; that is filler. If time is short, write three precise sentences with names and works rather than a long paragraph without them.