In linguistics, violating a maxim is when you break one of Grice's Maxims on purpose, but you don't want anyone else to notice.

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Shafiah R. asked a great question: how do you revise well for A Streetcar Named Desire? Specifically, how do you do it for the Edexcel exam board?

Here are some bullet points of what I suggest you do if you're in a similar boat. This might even be a good blog post for me to expand on in the future!

• Don't bother spending too much time learning quotes. If you're doing the Edexcel exam board, you're lucky in that you get to have the text with you in the exam! So, don't spend too much of your time actively learning quotes. You're expending energy on something with very little utility, where you could be doing other important things. If you're doing good revision, you'll learn some basic quotes, anyway! Instead, make sure you know when specific things happen. Test yourself on how quickly you can turn to the correct page that you're looking for. Make sure you know every single event that happens in the text and where they happen.
• Study thematically. One of the most successful ways you can revise for anything in English Language and Literature is to create some sort of visual aid for each theme you find in the text. I would suggest making mind maps, personally. What you'll do is you'll put a theme like 'masculinity' in the middle. The initial arrows coming off it will be to arguments, not to literary devices that you've noticed. Then, from those argument-based points, you'll have mini mind maps where you add devices, quotes and context. You should colour code this. Have one colour for the argument, one for the quote, one for the context.
• Apply new linguistic concepts. For drama, one of the best things you can delve into more is pragmatics. In particular, I would learn about Politeness Theory and Grice's Maxims and see how you can apply them to the characters. What do you learn from the fact that Blanche so regularly performs negative politeness, for example?
• Read EMC articles. The English and Media Centre has some great articles on A Streetcar Named Desire in their Emag. Lots of schools subscribe to this, so check with your school teacher. The articles in this magazine are written by teachers for students, so they're great for learning what you need to and easy to understand. Print them. Highlight interesting arguments to bolster your AO1. Write short paragraphs about whether you agree or disagree with the points in them. Make sure you also pick out words and phrases that you like which you could add to your own toolbox.
• Open the book to a random two-page spread. In the exam, you're going to get a random extract that you have to analyse before applying it to the rest of the text. So, choose some random extracts for yourself! Open your book to any random two pages and treat this like an extract. Ask yourself what theme the examiner would ask you to talk about for this extract. Use that to create your own question. Then, plan it! If you need to work on writing enough for the exam, I would recommend writing it, too. Do this at least once a week leading up to the exam. The more times you do this, the more likely it is that you will have already seen and planned the extract you get in the exam. Past papers are great, but they've already been done. So, the likelihood of them coming up again is lower.
• Learn the genre conventions. Aristotle's conventions of tragedy are a really good place to start when it comes to adding some nuanced, A literary concepts to your Streetcar answer. They're also excellent to put in your introduction. You can talk about how the extract fits into a specific part of the tragedy conventions, such as the peripeteia, anagnorisis, or an exemplification of someone's hamartia, etc. You can also talk about how Williams deviates* from those tragedy conventions to serve the Southern Gothic aspects of the text. Talk about Plastic Theatre, too. Apply them to your arguments. How do these genre conventions further your arguments?
• Think about power dynamics. One of the most important things to consider in drama is how the power dynamics are presented on stage. There are so many things that you can use to talk about those power dynamics! For example, gendered language, modal verbs, blocking, imperatives, interrogative sentences, who dominates the conversation, politeness theory, etc. Since you're getting an extract, you can talk about how power is given and taken throughout the scene. It doesn't stay the same. It fluctuates depending on a bunch of things, like who has something that the other person wants, who knows something important, etc. Most scenes in drama involve a battle for power in some way. So, get used to identifying these power shifts and battles throughout your text and talking about them.

I'm thinking of making a kinda course that's basically interactive revision! It will give you a bunch of revision tasks to do yourself each day. Does that sound like something that would be useful to people?

Also, please feel free to add your own tips! I might comment some extra as I think of them.