French Essays

IrishKev

Hi,
In the French Higher Level LC exam papers, when you are doing a "Qu'en Pensez Vous?" question it says that you should write around 75 words. Our teacher that we have had since first year says that we should stick to more or less 75 words, and that we could lose marks if we write more words than that (as in around 100 words or more). But we had a sub teacher for around a week a few weeks back, and she said that there's no point in only writing 75 words if you don't get your full point across. Our normal teacher insists that you shouldn't write much more than 75 words. Does everyone else's teacher say the same, or do write as much as you can to get your point across?

H2student

Here's what my teacher said:

By writing about 75 words, you decrease the chance of making mistakes but still manage to meet the word count. If you did it well you can still get the marks you want in 75 words. When the examiner is correcting your paper during the summer he/she will have probably a few hundred other scripts to correct as well. Imagine seeing three essays/response that are 30-40 words over the suggested word count. That's about 20-30% more work, I'd be pretty pi--ed off myself.

^ She said that, not me (with some modificaton :P). Sometimes, I feel that I am confined by the word count as well. When I read it to myself, I think that it doesn't really make much sense jumping from only giving one example to concluding my essay.

V Looking forward to hearing other people's opinions.

IrishKev

H2student wrote: »

I feel that I am confined by the word count as well. When I read it to myself, I think that it doesn't really make much sense jumping from only giving one example to concluding my essay.

Yeah that's my main feeling aswell, the "essay" is barely a half page long for me, and when you're supposed to give around 2 points along with an opening and a conclusion, it becomes very hard to fit into not even 15 lines.
True though, I wouldn't like to be correcting 150 lines an essay half way through the summer The Dept. of Education are really putting limits on work nowadays, our Tech Graph project had a limit aswell which was fairly hard to cut down to.

dambarude

I read in books, and heard french teachers on revision programmes on the radio, saying you should write more than 75 mots. Not a lot more, maybe 100-115 words, but more nonetheless. Look at the exemplar answers in the chief examiners report to see the length of a good answer. I copied some of them into word to see the word count, and they were all longer than 75 words.

IrishKev

Interesting, I'm averaging at around 110-120 words at the mo I think, so that should be fine for the mock and real exam. Thanks

pathway33

dambarude wrote: »

I .. heard french teachers on revision programmes on the radio, saying you should write more than 75 mots. Not a lot more, maybe 100-115 words

I heard this too. The podcasts from the 2009 'countdown to 306' are on the rte site http://www.rte.ie/exams/french.html if you want to hear the french teacher talking on length

felic

Interesting. I always believed that the 'about 75 words' criterion was there as a guide referring to 'around' or 'at least' 75 words. I think its unrealistic to expect students with the time allocated on the exam day, to be able to count the words they are writing and then continue to revise the essay in the same exam until the 75 word limit, no less no more, is reached.

From what I remember, the written section of the paper is done on space provided on the question script. So basically, fill that space and dont write your answer in a separate answer book. There's no need for that. I would focus more on developing points, strict care to verbs and tenses, explaining your points in concise fashion, giving as full an answer as possible... instead of worrying about the word limit.

Do you seriously think the marker correcting your exam is going to sit down before they even begin to read your answer and manually count the number of words you wrote and give you a mark on that alone? Nonsense. Write as much as you see fit, but dont write too little because you wont have answered the question properly, and dont write too much because you risk going off topic and spending too much time on any particular question.

dambarude

felic wrote: »

So basically, fill that space and dont write your answer in a separate answer book. .

If you filled the whole space left for each question in French you'd probably be writing way too much.