Here is a breakdown of essay questions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that I’ve made for students to practise their essay style and exam technique!
Hope you enjoy them; they’re specially tailored towards AQA, OCR, Edexcel, WJEC, CCEA, Eduqas and CIE (Cambridge) exam boards. They all contain extr...
MACBETH: ESSAY QUESTION
BREAKDOWN
Below, you’ll find two Macbeth essay questions - each one is broken down into a clear process that
shows you how to identify keywords, select information from the extract, formulate a plan and develop
a thesis. This is a generalised process, so make sure to check your own exam board and mark scheme
criteria and tailor your essays to suit them - for instance, some exams might be heavily contextual and
need you to use more context than is given here; others may require you to use critics’ quotations or
give you a pure question with no extract for support. Regardless of which type of essay you have to
write, you can use the templates given below as a way of giving yourself a clear structure and format to
plan and organise your ideas.
Always use the following process, regardless of the question or exam board:
STEP 1: Underline keywords of the question + Find the focus
STEP 2: Collect together ideas on the focus of the question - this may include underlining parts of the
extract, or sketching out your own thoughts
STEP 3: Organise your thoughts into a clear plan - make sure this plan is suited to the type of essay
you’re writing (e.g. argumentative, close reading, discursive or comparative)
STEP 4: Develop and refine a clear thesis that ties all your different paragraphs together
STEP 5: Write the essay!
STEP 6: Check and edit
The process below will take you through steps 1-4, up to the point where you write the essay. The
‘notes’ section in a real exam doesn’t need to be this long, a lot of this part of the process should be
in your head if you’re working in timed conditions! It’s written out in detail here so you can see how it
should work.
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