Notes on marking GCSE English Papers🖊️

Top 3 mistakes seen in English Literature papers (2025 cohort)

I’ve spent countless hours marking GCSE English papers—the good, the bad and the flat-out ridiculous, so that I can learn where students lose marks.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 3 mistakes I’ve seen in GCSE English Literature papers this year.

The first point relates to the Literature papers only, but mistakes two and three relate to both English Language and Literature.

If you’ve yet to sit your exams, take note so you don’t make the same mistakes.

1. Retelling the plot

A literature essay is not a retelling of the plot, nor does the Literature exam directly award marks for accurately summarizing a text.

A literature essay is an argument and if you’re not making an argument your lit. essay isn’t going to climb past the bottom rungs of the mark scheme, no matter how successfully you relay the plot of a novel or explain the relationships between characters.

Sadly, many students fail to grasp this and there are a significant number of students who will learn their texts inside out, yet will perform very badly because they don’t develop an informed, conceptual argument. Ultimately, the whole point of your essay should be to explain or argue what you can learn from the text or what messages the writer subtly communicates.

I outline how to plan a top grade essay in this article, explaining how you can write an argumentative, conceptual essay.

2. Leaning too heavily on single words and phrases.

Okay, so you should zoom into words and phrases. That said, you need to be careful not to stack too many inferences on single words or phrases.

For example, in an essay on An Inspector Calls, Mr Birling says ‘a man has to look after himself and his own’. Students quoting this line might say things such as the noun ‘man’ shows that Edwardian England is a patriarchal society where women don’t have power. While there is something to be said about the use of the gendered pronoun, the word ‘man’ alone isn’t by itself conclusive evidence of a toxic patriarchy.

This is a prime example of resting too much inference on a single word. Don’t do this and start to develop the habit of looking for supporting or complementing evidence.

You can do this by zooming out. For example, it’s hinted that Mr Birling is primarily addressing Gerald and Eric with the presumption that as men they will be the breadwinners of their families. Additionally, everyone leaves the room after Mr Birling’s speech so he and Gerald can continue talking man-to-man and smoke cigars.

Referencing all of this evidence, you can infer that Edwardian society is very patriarchal with women excluded from the world of business.

3. Alphabet spaghetti

One thing I’ve heard again and again is that students cannot be penalized for bad handwriting.

While that’s technically correct, handwriting which verges on illegibility will probably cost marks.

Here’s why. Examiners are paid per script.

A script with poor handwriting will take much longer to read. Naturally, this will annoy the examiner marking the work and they will be harsher with their marking.

They may even gloss over parts because:

1) It isn’t worth their time.

2) They don’t have the time if they want to meet their marking quota. So, if your handwriting is poor you may not be credited for all the good points you make.

Of course, there are systems in place to ensure all papers are marked fairly.

But examiners are given a certain amount of tolerance given the subjective nature of English, so they can safely shave marks within reason. What’s more, losing even 1–2 marks per question because of poor handwriting can really add up and equate to a whole grade over the course of all four papers.

The bottom line is that it’s too idealistic to imagine that every examiner is going to patiently decipher your writing if it looks like alphabet spaghetti.

Your handwriting doesn’t have to be neat, but it shouldn’t require a magnifying glass to decipher either.

Thanks for reading. Btw, I’m sorry for the number of subscribe buttons on my last newsletter. I don’t know how that happened and I hope I’ve resolved the issue.

Best,

Morgan