Honestly, writing HSC English essay structures can be so incredibly painful and time-consuming.
You’ve got to go and dig across all of your notes, find the key information, the examples, the techniques, the quotes — everything that you need to write an essay!
It can take a lot of time and often the end result can also be a little hit-and-miss, right?
The thing is, there’s a super-easy way to study and prep for English that is going to make writing essay structures so much quicker and also improve the quality.
Find out what it is in this article!
The TEA Table
Theme
Examples
Analysis
Why Should You Use This Table?
The TEA Table
So the #1 way to improve your HSC English essay structure is to utilise a TEA Table.
Using one of these is going to transform how you study. It’s all about how you structure, categorise, and organise your study notes for HSC English!
But what is a TEA table, and how do we implement it?
First off, you’re going to have a table with a few columns, and each column is going to include something different. It should look something like this:
But what exactly do we include in each column?
T – Theme or idea
When you’re analysing a text, you’re typically looking for the meaning within. For what the composer was trying to communicate.
What were the ideas or themes that they were talking about?
Occasionally you might also look at characters and it might be a character-focussed study, and so you could substitute out the theme or the idea for a character.
So in this first column, what you’re going to do is write “Theme”, “Idea”, or “Character” as your title, and based on what you’ve learned in class, fill this column in with information relevant to your texts.
E – Examples
Now that you’ve identified a theme, idea, or character within your text, you want to find evidence or examples that relate to this theme/idea/character specifically.
Do this during the first read-through of your text, and every time you find a relevant piece of evidence, write it down in the E section of your TEA table.
Now, the point of this is that once you’ve completed your text, you’re going to have a huge list of examples already lined up.
Most of the time, students pick pretty crappy examples.
These examples are the easiest ones that they can find last-minute as they’re flipping through the text. They’re the same ones that most students use, so they don’t really stand out or differentiate themselves.
However, if you already have a list when you go to write your HSC English essay structure, you don’t have to dig through your text to find relevant evidence and you’ll have a bunch of different examples to draw from!
Our experienced HSC English tutors can help you create your TEA Table and support you with your HSC English studies in the comfort of your own home or at one of our Campuses in Hornsby or the Hills.
A – Analysis
For the analysis section of your table, you’re going to look at the idea/theme/character that you’re focusing on and you’re going to go through all of the examples you found.
Once you’ve done this, you’re going to identify and analyse the technique that’s being used by the composer of the text in your certain examples.
Then, you’re going to highlight how your composer uses this example and technique to say something interesting or meaningful about the idea, theme, or character that you highlighted in column one.
This is the last section of the table that you have to fill in!
Why should you use this table?
This table is going to give you the core structure of your HSC English essay structure.
You need to include a bucket load of evidence and analysis in each of your essay paragraphs, so this will help you write essays lightning fast.
It’s also going to help you categorise all of your ideas, evidence, and analysis so you’re going to be able to find the best content from your text for any potential question.
With the current syllabus, this is even more important because you can’t rote memorise HSC English essays anymore!
The questions are much more specific, which means that you need to know your text in a lot of detail.
As your teacher goes through the text with you in class, make sure that you’re building your TEA table as you go. This is going to help you take the brilliance of your English teacher and put it into a structure that’s going to be easily usable by the time it comes to actually writing your essay!
While TEA tables are great for memorising content, it’s also important to nail your linking sentences in paragraphs. Learn how to craft effective linking sentences with our guide!
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