LGCSE Literature in English (0185) common mistakes
LGCSE Literature in English (0185) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Opens each paragraph with a plot event ("Then the narrator meets...") and works through the text chronologically, so the essay becomes a chapter summary with a quotation attached to each stage.
Knowing what happens is rewarded in class quizzes, and re-reading feels like revision, so under time pressure retelling is the safest way to generate volume. Nobody has modelled the difference between story and argument.
What to do instead
Plan by claim, not by chapter. Write three or four topic sentences that each answer the question directly, then choose one short quotation per claim. Apply the "so what?" test to every sentence: if it only reports an event, convert it into what the event reveals about character, theme or the writer's choices.
Treats the narrator as a transparent window, reporting what the narrator says as fact and never asking who is speaking, what that voice cannot know, or why the writer chose this teller and this order of telling.
Terms such as focalisation, unreliable narrator, retrospective narration and free indirect speech get learned as definitions to be labelled rather than as tools for reading, so candidates have no procedure for applying them to a passage.
What to do instead
Run a narrator audit on each set text: who speaks, to whom, from what point in time, and what is withheld, distorted or over-explained. Quote one moment where the narration colours the reader's judgement, describe the effect first, then name the method.
Lists devices ("the poet uses alliteration, a simile and enjambment") without stating what each one makes the reader see, hear or feel, so the analysis stops at identification and never reaches interpretation.
Device lists are compact, memorisable and look technical, and weaker candidates believe naming a technique earns the analysis mark. Paraphrase feels like the only alternative when the meaning of a line is genuinely unclear.
What to do instead
Use a three-step sentence for every quotation: name the device, state the precise effect on meaning, then the reader's response. For example, "the hard /t/ sounds make the line feel mechanical, so the speaker's grief reads as numbness rather than tears." Fewer devices, fully worked through, score far higher.
In comparison questions, writes one paragraph or mini-essay on poem A and then one on poem B, with no sentence that holds both poems together in the same thought.
Poems are taught one at a time, so candidates know each text in isolation; comparison feels like an extra demand, and linking language is rarely practised aloud, so the answer splits along the texts instead of along ideas.
What to do instead
Organise by point of comparison, not by poem. Each paragraph should state a similarity or difference in method or effect, quote both poems, then weigh them: "whereas A's caesura slows the line, B's run-on quickens it." Build a bank of comparison stems and practise saying them.
Writes about a play as though it were a novel, discussing characters' motives and feelings but never the stage directions, entrances and exits, props, off-stage action, act and scene division, or what the audience knows that a character does not.
Plays are studied from a printed page and performance vocabulary is rarely drilled. Describing motivation is familiar from earlier comprehension work, so it becomes the default mode even when the question asks about drama.
What to do instead
Read each set scene aloud and block it: who is on stage, what they hold, what the audience can see. Train one question - "what does the audience know here that this character does not?" - and answer it with a quoted stage direction or a line of dramatic irony.
Quotes three or four lines of dialogue as a block and then paraphrases them, or asserts conflict as a fact ("there is conflict between Nora and Torvald") without tracing how it builds, pauses or breaks across scenes.
Dialogue is read for information about plot, and long quotations feel like strong evidence. Candidates have not been shown how interruption, silence, verse-to-prose shifts and forms of address carry dramatic pressure.
What to do instead
Quote the shortest exchange that carries the tension and analyse how it is spoken: who interrupts, who uses imperatives, where the aside or pause falls. Track one conflict through three moments in the play and chart its escalation rather than announcing it.
Reads the unseen extract once, underlines nothing and starts writing within two minutes, then discovers mid-paragraph that the tone is ironic or that the final lines reverse the opening.
Exam nerves make writing feel like progress, and candidates fear running out of time. Without a taught reading routine, the first impression hardens into the whole interpretation and there is no second look.
What to do instead
Budget two readings. First pass: literal sense and who is speaking. Second pass: annotate the title, the first and last sentences, any turn or shift in tense, place or addressee, and mark three short quotations. Commit to a one-sentence tone statement before drafting the introduction.
Writes about an unseen poem in vague abstractions - "the poet conveys his feelings about life through powerful imagery" - without naming a single word of the text or following the poem's movement from line to line.
An unfamiliar text feels risky, so candidates retreat to safe generalities that sound literary. They lack a method for building meaning from the opening line and treat the poem as a mood rather than a sequence of choices.
What to do instead
Anchor every sentence to a quoted word or phrase and to a position in the poem ("in the third stanza the long sentence finally ends"). Ask what changes between the opening and closing lines, and use that change as your thesis about the whole poem.
Drops a quotation into a sentence as proof and moves straight on, so the words are never examined: "He is ambitious: 'I have no spur'." The comment step is missing entirely.
Candidates are repeatedly told to include quotations and assume that inclusion itself earns the mark. Choosing a phrase, embedding it grammatically and unpacking its connotations are separate skills that are rarely practised on their own.
What to do instead
After every quotation write two sentences: what the exact words connote or do, and how that supports the claim. Embed short phrases inside your own syntax and cut quotations that decorate rather than prove. If you cannot write the two sentences, you have chosen the wrong quotation.
Answers the topic rather than the question, ignoring qualifiers such as "how far", "in what ways" or "here and elsewhere", and opens with "In this essay I will write about..." instead of a judgement.
Prepared notes are organised by theme, so an essay shape built in advance gets reused whatever the wording. The introduction formula is learned early at school and feels like a safe way to begin under pressure.
What to do instead
Underline the instruction word, the focus and any scope words before planning. Write a thesis in one sentence that takes a position on that exact question, then four topic sentences that each advance it. Delete any paragraph that would still fit if the question were changed.