Practise, practise, and practise some more.
There is a saying that practice makes perfect.
There is another saying that practice makes permanent.
Having the requisite practice, within the time limit, will help make your essay perfect and also solidify your essay writing skills.
Even if you read a lot, and have thought through many issues and themes, and you are strong in your language abilities, you will still need to practise writing your essay within your time limit.
Practise writing GP essays within a time limit to ensure that you can actually do so within an examination context.
The question is, how should you practise writing your GP essay?
First, you will have to draft up a plan within 10 to 15 minutes (15 minutes should be the maximum time for planning). If you fail to plan, you plan to fail – as the saying goes. Your plan should be a point form version of your essay preparation and the various clusters of arguments you have prepared, except that you align your content with the demands of the essay question. In other words, adapt your plan to fit the requirements of the essay question. Purely regurgitating what you have learnt is not an adequate plan, but adapting your content and examples, and aligning them and making them relevant towards answering the question is.
Always remember to answer the question posed, and not a question that you think was asked.
Second, after you have planned, then start writing for real, to get down your arguments and evaluative comments on paper, in neat, legible, and plain writing. Now this is pure common sense, but writing in neat, legible, and plain writing is very important to scoring marks. I have, on occasion, not given marks to students simply because I could not read their handwriting. However, I also do know of teachers who have given a slightly higher grade because of the presentation of the ideas – neat, legible, plain, and readable handwriting, with proper paragraphing of roughly equal lengths each, and with proper margins, and with good grammar and spelling.
After a lot of practice, you will find that scoring a top grade for A level General Paper is actually much easier than it seems. You just need to make sure that you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it.
You plan to make sure you answer the question, and to align your content and examples to the context of the question; and you write neatly, legibly, plainly, and readably, in proper paragraphs, and with proper margins, and with good grammar and handwriting, so that you can help your GP tutor or the A level examiner award you a high and well-deserved grade.
Remember to practise within a time limit – and practise in the proper way.
JC General Paper Essays – how to prepare for GP