Aiming to do English at university?

You made it!

Congratulations to those of you whose results enabled you to make it on to your chosen degree course! Now you have had time to recover from Freshers’ Week, we hope you are enjoying your studies.

If you find yourself plunging into the mysteries of Piers Plowman or the medieval pageant plays, with the benefit of hindsight, you can now appreciate how helpful it was if you were lucky enough to encounter Middle English at A Level.

You want to make it!

However, if you are taking A’s right now, and struggling through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for the first time, it might not seem that way! Middle English takes a bit of getting used to. Plurals and possessives are different and the spelling of words can be pretty fluid.

Actually, one of the best things to do when faced with a page of Middle English text is simply to read it aloud – it often makes the meaning clearer and you can start to get a sense of the humour and energy in much of Chaucer’s writing.

Help is on hand so you can succeed

The keen eyed among you will have spotted that www.crossref-it.info has got a new Chaucer text online – The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. It is full of notes and background info to help you get to grips with a text which was as scabrous in its time as The Thick of It is today. Chaucer paints a wicked portrait of his narrator, whose corruption puts modern political scandals in the shade. Yet at the same time we are able to appreciate his audacity and persuasive sales ‘patter’.

It may be in Middle English, but this medieval tale has a contemporary punch!

Succeed in your interview and get onto that English university course

Any joy with university interviews? English is a tough course to get onto – though great to do once you get there!

Interviewers want to see that you have grasped the texts you are studying, but also that you have read beyond them.

What connections can you see between one text an author has written and others written before it or afterwards? E.g. if you’re studying Tess, how does it relate to an earlier work by Hardy such as Far From The Madding Crowd? How does an author’s output echo the themes / subject matter of contemporaries?

An interviewer always sits up when you notice that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for example, draws on the same gothic elements that Austen mocks in Northanger Abbey, published the same year.

It can be tougher to connect with what was going on in society at the time. I remember an interviewer asking me why Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 referred to ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ and I was so relieved I remembered about Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530’s!

Knowledge like this can make the difference between the university offering you a place or not. You’ll find Crossref-it.info provides a quick way of finding out all the contextual information you need to help you shine in an interview.

And yes, it can mean hours of curling up with a book. But hopefully that’s why you want to take English anyway!