Section II
Four or five short comments on a shared idea, and half an hour to write one piece in response. Nearly every bad essay here is a competent essay about the wrong question.
Four quotes, one theme. Spot it from six candidates, name it in your own words, or plan a full essay against the clock and compare your shape with three worked angles.
86 themes · 344 quotes →The writingWhat markers reward, a shape that survives thirty minutes, how to use a quote properly, and the openings worth abandoning.
Read the toolkit →Why it matters
Task A is social and political. Task B is personal and reflective.
The comments are chosen so that they do not quite agree. Take four quotes about power. One says power corrupts, another says it reveals, a third says it is measured by its use. The noun is power. The disagreement is whether character gets formed by circumstance or merely exposed by it.
Write about the noun and you produce a general essay about power that could have been written before you opened the paper. Markers see hundreds of those. Write about the disagreement and you are answering something, which reads very differently on the page.
Find the noun, then find the argument the four quotes are having about it. The second one is your essay.
Under the clock
Thirty minutes, spent in roughly this shape.
0:00–0:30
Read all four. No planning during the first read.
0:30–1:00
Write the noun in the margin. One word.
1:00–2:00
Write the tension as a question. Which quote disagrees with which, and about what?
2:00–5:00
Thesis, three moves, and the one quote you will name.
5:00–27:00
Write.
27:00–30:00
Read it back. Fix the sentences that do not parse.