In my time as a tutor, I’ve met hundreds of hardworking, diligent students. Their motivation and effort are through the roof! They know their texts like the back of their hands, learn quotes religiously, and take the best notes possible in class. They hand in all their homework on time, and their attendance is as high as it can be. Plus, they’re having tutoring with me! They’re doing extra, voluntary English on the side, so you know they want this. But despite all of that, they feel like they’re stuck on a B.
Every essay from their teacher seems to get the same dreaded grade.
It doesn’t seem to matter how they change things. They could spend their whole night responding to their feedback, but still! Nothing changes!
That’s probably the most frustrating situation you can find yourself in.
Don’t get me wrong: a B is a fantastic grade. It’s above average, and plenty of unis accept it! But when you know you’ve been working as hard as an A* student, the same B grade over and over again feels like a slap in the face.
If you’re feeling that way, you’re not alone. There are plenty of students who have been in the same position before you. In fact, there are plenty of students who feel the same way right now!
And the good news is, things aren’t usually as dire as you might think. Most of the time, you won’t have to do a huge amount to get out of the B-rut you’re stuck in. You just need to shift your mindset and make some tweaks to how you write essays.
Here are the 10 things that might be stopping you from hitting the A* you deserve.
Reasons You’re Stuck at a B
1. You’re reading study guides and textbooks, but no essays
Study guides can be a real lifesaver – especially with complex texts like Shakespeare!
But there’s a problem: the more study guides you read, the more your writing style adapts to sound like them.
That’s a huge issue. It could be the root cause of why you’re stuck on a B!
Study guides and essays have completely different purposes! So, the language and structure should be different.
Study guides are written to teach. They help you understand the text, introduce you to context and recap for revision. There might be some good analysis, but they don’t exist to show you how to write.
On the other hand, we write essays to argue. In a good essay, we build a strong interpretation of the text based on the question. Then, it’s our job to make the reader of our essay see the text the same way we do. That’s how we hit those AO1 marks.
But if you write like a study guide, you’re not doing that. You’re probably describing the events. And they know the text better than you do. They’re an examiner! They’ve read it like 20 times! They don’t need you to tell them what’s happening. Just guide them through your argument.
The fix for this is easy but takes some time. You just need to read some essays to reset your writing style. It helps you to see what good essays should look like. Plus, it’s likely you’ll learn something new that the study guides didn’t cover, too!
You can find good essays through the EMC, JSTOR, the New Casebooks collection and the Norton Critical Editions of books. Plus, you can always check what I’ve got available on this site!
2. You’re using a restrictive essay structure
When you’re doing your GCSEs, teachers love to teach you essay-writing acronyms. In fact, even I do it! I’m currently in the process of building a whole course on the PETZAL essay structure to help GCSE students. Right now, the lesson where I explain the acronym is one of my best-performing pages of my website! I get the appeal!
But the thing is, they don’t work for A-levels.
Those acronyms like PEE, PEA, PETAL and PETZAL are like training wheels. They’re there to make sure you learn how to write essays quickly and easily without too many disasters along the way. But if you never learn how to write essays without them, you’re really limiting yourself. You’d never win the Tour de France if you still had to stick stabilisers on your bike!
One of the biggest signs of an A* essay is whether it sounds academic or not. The paragraphs need to connect together and build on each other to have a strong line of argument! Those kinds of acronyms stop that. They force you to restrict how your thoughts weave together and make your paragraphs feel like they could stand all by themselves.
And don’t even get me started on students who start a paragraph with something like, ‘one way the writer presents…’! It literally makes your essay sound more like a list than an argument. Nothing works together – and you force yourself to talk about one method per paragraph! Yikes!
This is perhaps the biggest reason why students get stuck on a B in their essays. Once you break out of those formulaic structures devoid of passion, the sky’s your limit!
3. You haven’t engaged with the question properly
There are so many students who don’t fully pick apart and grapple with the question before they start writing. That leads to them taking some words in the question in isolation and writing paragraphs about them, rather than responding to the whole question.
That’s hard to understand, so let me give you an example from my own experiences as an English teacher.
In my school, we do OCR English Literature A-level. In the second part of Paper 1, students have to compare two texts they’ve studied by responding to a statement. The question might look something like this:
‘Powerful emotions are often the excuse for unacceptable behaviour’. In the light of this view, consider ways in which writers explore the connection between intense thoughts and bad deeds. [30]
A student who gets stuck at a B (if they’re lucky) doesn’t actually look at the question and ask themselves, ‘Do powerful emotions excuse unacceptable behaviour or not?’. Instead, they pull out the words ‘powerful emotions’ and give me a paragraph on that, completely ignoring whether or not they cause unacceptable behaviour. Then, they’ll write another paragraph on unacceptable behaviour and call it a day.
Or, even worse, they’ll ignore the statement entirely and look at the themes in the instructions and talk about those! No more responding to the statement! Just one paragraph about ‘intense thoughts’ and another on ‘bad deeds’.
The sign of an A* student here is to stick to the question as a whole and answer it at all times.
4. You haven’t asked yourself enough sub-questions (or any at all)
And speaking of exam questions, the thing that gets a lot of students stuck on a B is whether they’ve picked apart the question.
The more you pick it apart, the easier it is for you to get an A*. It shows that you understand there’s more than one way to read a question and stops you from engaging with it in a shallow, surface-level way.
The best way to do that is to ask yourself sub-questions.
They make you engage with words in the question and force you to be more nuanced about what you’re writing. Not all of them will make it into your essay, but they get you thinking in interesting ways that pull your essays up to an A or A*.
For me to give you some examples, let’s take the question from that OCR exam again.
‘Powerful emotions are often the excuse for unacceptable behaviour’. In the light of this view, consider ways in which writers explore the connection between intense thoughts and bad deeds. [30]
For this question, some good sub-questions would be:
- What do we mean by ‘excuse’?
- What do we mean by ‘unacceptable behaviour’?
- Who decides whether behaviour is unacceptable?
- Whose emotions are considered to be ‘powerful’?
From there, I get some interesting answers. I think about the fact that the word ‘excuse’ can either mean a bad, dismissed reason or a justification. That then leads me on to another sub-question: whose behaviour is excused (or justified) by their powerful emotions, and whose is just seen as a flimsy excuse?
If you answer those questions in your plan and incorporate them into your essay, you’ll have the nuance and deep, analytical thinking needed of an A* student.
Plus, as a bonus, OCR’s guidance shows that they consider engaging with the question like this to be AO5. AQA says a similar thing in its exemplar marking! So if you have those exam boards, you’re also getting marks for different interpretations!
5. You think English essays have to reinvent the wheel
Even though I’ve said that your essays need to have nuance, that doesn’t mean that you need to say something no one has ever said before.
In fact, that’s not even something you have to do when you’re doing an undergraduate degree at uni! You can even get a pretty good grade without doing it for a master’s degree! It’s only when you’re doing your PhD that anyone expects you to say something new and unique. That’s partially because you have to read so much to even know if no one’s said that thing before.
There are thousands of students sitting their A-levels in English literature every year. And even though there are quite a few text combos that students can do, there are only a finite number. Schools will usually do the same combo every year for multiple classes. And there are some combinations that are easier to teach and find comparisons for than others, so multiple schools will do the same mix of books.
With that much cross-over, I promise you that there is a 99.9999% chance you’re not saying anything new. Even if your teacher has never discussed that particular idea with you before, someone else has at a different place or time.
The examiner isn’t expecting you to be revolutionary with your interpretation. So, students who think they need to be unique end up wasting time and energy for no reason.
That’s going to get you stuck on a B grade. You could have focused on asking yourself some better sub-questions and worked on nuance instead!
6. You sound too much like AI
AI is one of the biggest threats to our learning, creativity and planet at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong. AI can be great! I’d be a liar if I said I haven’t ever used it. It’s saved me when looking for a single sentence from the 400 articles I’m reading for uni, for example. If we put laws in place to protect people and find more eco-friendly ways to run the servers, it could improve the world!
But when it comes to how we learn and create, it just allows people to produce terrible, low-effort content. And very few people know or care how to use AI to enhance their learning. They just want to think as little as possible. Or, they want to pass off crappy, uncanny, plagiarised work as their own.
Believe me: with my ADHD, I get the appeal of using it when you’ve left an important task to the last minute. But it’s not going to do us any good in the long run.
I could rant all day about why you should stop letting AI replace you, but that’s not the issue right now. The problem is that it’s filling your head with AI-generated content, getting you stuck on a B-grade at best, or accused of plagiarism at worst.
Just like with study guides, reading a lot of AI content makes your writing style adjust to match it.
And frankly, AI doesn’t write very good essays.
It overly explains everything it says, and its arguments are way too vague. Plus, it will hallucinate quotes that are absolutely not in your texts, especially if there isn’t a free version of it online for it to take quotes from.
So, please don’t rely on AI. It will stop you from getting an A*.
7. You’re describing or explaining rather than arguing
As I’ve said before, the main reason why writing like a study guide will get you stuck at a B is because of the descriptiveness. They describe what happens in the texts like they’re helping you to understand the plot of the story! But your essays need to be argumentative instead.
But it isn’t just students who read too many study guides who fall into this pattern. Lots of students seem to think they need to explain everything for their argument to make sense.
It all comes down to the way that you talk about the evidence that you’re using. Many students use way too many description-based words and phrases, which make their essays sound less like arguments and more like storytelling. For example, a student may say something like this:
Then, Hamlet stages a play within a play to ‘catch the conscience of’ King Claudius. King Claudius reacts with horror when he sees the play, showing how performance and reality merges into one in the court.
There’s a lot of good stuff going on in that essay extract! The student embeds quotes well and chooses some very good examples from the text. Plus, the point about performance and reality merging is really insightful. However, it still feels too descriptive and wastes words.
The use of the adverb ‘then’ at the beginning of the extract is one of the biggest indicators that this student’s point is going to get descriptive. But there are other things that give it away, too! Like the use of the present-tense verbs like ‘reacts’ and ‘stages’, which we tend to use when we’re talking descriptively about a story.
It’s pretty easy to change those, and it makes a huge difference to your grade. Something like this is much better:
Hamlet’s attempt to ‘catch the conscience’ of King Claudius with a play-within-a-play, as well as Claudius’s subsequent horror, indicate a blending of performance and reality in the court.
Those two examples are saying the same thing. However, in this newer one, you’re showing the reader that you know that they’ve read the text, too. Plus, it focuses more on the argument than what happened.
8. Your comments on the text are too surface-level
Lots of students make boring, surface-level points about their set texts. They stick to arguments that are easy to agree with and don’t take a lot of explaining to understand. This gets them stuck at a B because it decreases the quality of everything else in their essay!
Let’s look at a common example of what I mean: ‘The writer presents women as oppressed by society’. That’s a simple, basic point to make. You won’t need to do a lot of work to prove it! It’s just a given. So, you’ll probably choose some basic quotes to go with your basic point.
Then there’s your AO3 context. That will probably suck, too! Most likely, you’ll say something simple about women not working and being the property of men. That’s an oversimplification of the complex gender dynamics of any historical period you’re studying. It just proves you’ve barely thought about the context!
If you’re comparing two texts, your basic point will make your life harder, too. There won’t be much to say about differences! Both texts say that women are oppressed? Ok. Boring.
Then there’s AO5: your alternative interpretations. You could get them from different adaptations, schools of literary criticism, or direct quotes from critics and they would still suck if you have a basic point. What are you going to do? Find that one obscure critic who doesn’t think women are oppressed in historical texts? Or just talk about how much they agree with you? With a basic point, you’ve lost so much nuance.
Now, no one expects you to reinvent the wheel. You just have to understand the text better than surface level.
9. You’re using quotes poorly
Then, there’s how you use quotes.
Students stuck on a B-grade tend to make their quotes way too long.
I’ve seen this a lot in my classes at school. Let’s say a student wants to prove that women aren’t allowed to be their own people in A Doll’s House. They’ll find clauses or sentences that basically spell that out for them! Something like when Nora says, ‘[My father] told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions’.
The problem with that quote is that it’s an example of the text spelling things out for you right at the end! It’s so basic and surface-level that you don’t need to do much analysis. Plus, it’s just way too long.
There are plenty of other examples throughout the play of women who don’t have their own identity separate from the men around them. What about the use of the possessive pronoun ‘my’ and Torvald’s constant dehumanisation of Nora by calling her a ‘doll’ and a ‘songbird’? What about when Mrs Linde keeps saying she wants someone to ‘live for’?
Those ones are much shorter and much better for analysis. You actually have to explain how they prove your point.
But there are other things you can do with your quotes to get an A or A*.
Embedding your quotes makes your work sound so much more sophisticated. OCR in particular loves it! It’s when you integrate your quote into the sentence so it doesn’t feel like a quote anymore. Here’s an example from an essay I’ve written:
The presence of Laura’s foil and sister, Lizzie, emphasises Laura’s agency in her downfall by presenting the readership with a similar character who also experienced the same ‘blushes’ of sexual desire but ‘veiled’ her reactions.
Notice how the quotes fit into the sentence, there?
And then, of course, there’s the worst sin: not using enough quotes. Unlike at GCSE, you’ve got to have multiple quotes at A-level. One or two per paragraph just isn’t going to fly!
10. You’re using terminology and devices poorly
One of the biggest giveaways of a C or B-grade student is using terminology and devices badly.
It’s the most obvious with unseen essays. As I walk around my class during an assessment, I can tell which student’s essay will get stuck on a B before they even start writing. It’s all down to the way they annotate the text!
An A or A* student will start with AO1. They’ll think about the subjective things that help them build an interpretation first:
- Themes
- First impressions
- Purpose and aims of the text
- Messages of the text
Then, they’ll use that to go looking for quotes that can help them to back up their interpretations! The devices and terminology come after that, once they’ve found some good quotes that will help them build their argument.
On the other hand, a student who’s stuck on a B will go on a hunt for similes, metaphors, enjambment, passive voice and anything else they can find before they’ve even figured out what they think the text is trying to say!
We call this ‘feature spotting’. And after they’ve made this mistake, students will have no choice but to shoehorn in meaning over the top of what they’ve found. That’s going to make their point really weak.
On the other hand, that A* student will be able to use much more authentic terminology. They won’t just zoom into a word and try to claim that the meaning of the text hinges on that single thing(which is very GCSE). No interpretation ever lives and dies on a single word – even if it’s foregrounded in some way! Instead, they notice patterns and build a bigger picture of what the devices do as a whole.
I can help you get out of the B-rut you’re stuck in!
So, now you know what gets students stuck on a B. You might even start to notice some of the patterns you’ve fallen into on your own! Now what?
It can feel really overwhelming to try to change those things with no guidance, right? It’s all well and good to know what you’ve done wrong, but what can you do to fix the issue? In fact, how can you even be sure you’re on the right tracks in the first place?
Some of you might have some great teachers that you can turn to next. You can send them over an essay or two and see if your grade has changed. They might have some great feedback to give you that will turn your grades around!
But let’s be honest: that’s not true for most of you. You wouldn’t be here if your teacher were giving you perfect advice in a format that worked for you. And it’s not their fault! They’re overworked, underpaid and probably have 100 other books to mark!
That’s where I come in.
I’m currently in the process of writing a step-by-step course for writing A* A-level essays! So, stay tuned for that!
But until then, why not join a tutoring session with me? My one-to-ones are bespoke and detailed, with help from someone getting ready to do a PhD in this very subject! The group classes are more affordable, accessible and focus on building up your argumentation skills to ace any essay that comes your way.
Book a free meeting with me, and we can discuss what would work best for you.
