If your child’s GCSE English exams are coming up in the summer, they’re probably feeling especially daunted by the closed book literature questions.  By ‘closed book’ I mean the questions that require students to recall details of the texts without having access to the text in the exam. There are so many ‘key’ quotations to remember, it can feel overwhelming. The good news is if they start early enough (like NOW) they can make the task of memorizing quotations a lot more manageable. Here are seven hacks to make the job even easier.

1 Keep them short

There are three very persuasive reasons to keep the key quotations that you memorise short. Firstly,  the shorter the quote, the easier it is to remember. Secondly, it’s more straightforward to choose a word to ‘zoom’ in on and analyse if your quote is shorter. Thirdly, it’s simpler to integrate a shorter quote into a sentence in your essay. 

2 Make them stick…literally

Invest in some brightly coloured sticky notes, write one quotation on each and put them where you will see them. It’s a good idea to group them together logically – so for example, An Inspector Calls in your bedroom, Macbeth in the bathroom and so on. Also, don’t stick them all up at once: you’ll annoy your family and quickly become blind to your sticky notes as they become part of the furniture. As soon as you think you’ve ‘got’ a quotation, take it down and put a new one up. 

3 Use them or lose them

Whenever you write a practice essay, use quotations from your list. Try not to copy the quotation from the book when you practise – make yourself do the essay with your book closed. When you’ve finished, check the accuracy of the quotations you’ve included. Highlight those that need more work. 

4 Make them meaningful

Transfer your quotations to a theme or character tracker, like the one below, and here.  This will enable you to use your quotations to explain how a character or theme develops throughout a text. It’s also a neat way of keeping all your quotations in one place. 

5 Practise them in interesting ways

Educational research suggests that active, engaged revision is more likely to result in successful memorization than a passive technique, such as highlighting. Active quotation revision techniques include:

• Using paper flashcards – write the quotation on one side and key words from the quotation on the other. Use the key words to try to remember the whole quotation. 
• Gapping key quotations – write the quotation on a post-it, but blank out some of the words. Try to fill them in.
• Using digital flashcards – Quizlet allows you to make flashcards and then to test yourself in lots of different ways. Better still, you can revise on the go. 

6 Chunk them up and mix them up. 

Rome was not built in a day and learning all of the quotations that you’ll need all at once is impossible. Start with one text, and try to learn five quotations per day. Once you’ve done that, move onto the next five. After a week, return to the first five and test yourself.  When you’ve got a good collection of quotations under your belt, mix them in with another text, randomise their order and then test yourself again.  

7 Sit back, relax and listen

Learning quotations can be boring. To give your eyes a rest, why not exercise your ears instead. Use a voice recording app to record a few quotations and then play them back to yourself as regularly as possible. Pause and repeat them to yourself. 

Memorising quotations can feel slow and a little dull at times, but keep your goals realistic and you’ll soon have an impressive collection that you can recall during your GCSE English exam:

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson