How to learn quotations so they stay learned

AQA’s Literature exams are closed book, so you cannot take your copies of the texts in. On Paper 1 you get an extract from your Shakespeare play and from your 19th-century novel, but anything from the rest of each text comes from memory. On Paper 2 the modern text question has no extract at all, and in the poetry comparison you quote the second poem from memory.

How many to learn

Fewer than you might think. AQA’s examiners say that references to the text “do not have to be quotations”. A reference could be “identifying a character, an incident, an image or something else which is relevant to the point being made”. What they value is picking out the moments that help your argument most, “rather than just learning lots of quotations”.

So learn a short list well. About 15 to 20 quotations for each text is plenty, with two or three for each poem. Our quotation pages for A Christmas Carol, Macbeth and An Inspector Calls each give you a list of about 20, and Power and Conflict: the fifteen poems in brief has a short line for each poem.

Choose short lines that do several jobs

A short quotation is easier to learn exactly, and easier to fit into your own sentence. Most of the best ones are under ten words.

Pick lines that work for more than one character or theme. “Mankind was my business” from A Christmas Carol fits Marley, Scrooge’s change and responsibility. “Blood will have blood” from Macbeth fits guilt and violence. “I can’t accept any responsibility” from An Inspector Calls fits Mr Birling, the older generation and the whole idea of responsibility. One line like this can do the work of three.

A method that works

1. Make a card for each quotation. Write the quotation on one side. On the back, write who says it, where it comes from, one method and what it shows.
2. Say it, cover it, write it. Read the quotation aloud, cover it, write it from memory, then check every word and every comma. Repeat until it is exact.
3. Test yourself before you look. Read the back of a card and try to bring back the quotation, or read the quotation and recall who says it and what it shows. Pulling something back out of your memory like this is called retrieval practice.
4. Space it out. Ten minutes a day for several weeks beats an hour the night before. When you get a card right, move it to a pile you test once a week. When you get one wrong, it goes back in the daily pile.
5. Mix your texts. Shuffle cards from different texts together, so you have to work out where each one comes from.
6. Use them. Write one sentence for each quotation that builds it into your own words and says what it shows. That is what you will have to do in the exam.

Re-reading your notes can feel like learning, because the words look familiar. Testing yourself shows you what you really know. The Education Endowment Foundation reviewed the research in 2021. It found that, compared with no recap at all, the evidence for quizzes is “moderate and generally positive”, and that “Most studies that compare quizzing to forms of re-study or recap have a positive impact”, though results vary. It also describes spaced practice as the idea that “material is more easily learnt when broken apart by intervals of time”.

Keep it exact

Check every quotation against the text when you first copy it out. A short, exact quotation is better than a long one you half remember. If you forget a line in the exam, describe the moment in your own words: that still counts as a reference.

In December, the free A Christmas Carol: a quotation a day gives you one quotation for each day from 1 to 24 December. For a twelve-week plan that covers every text, see the free Year 11 countdown.

Sources

• AQA, GCSE English Literature 8702 specification
• AQA, Report on the examination: GCSE English Literature Paper 1, June 2023
• Education Endowment Foundation, Cognitive science approaches in the classroom and the summary of the evidence review (July 2021)