How do you decide which quotes to learn, and how do you revise them for the exam?

When writing an exam answer, each paragraph should make a point, give evidence, and explain/analyse the evidence in relation to the question. The evidence is crucial in showing that you understand the text, so picking good quotes to revise is key, and I would recommend revising quotes by topics. To choose topics, think about the key themes of the texts and, if relevant, the focus of the paper. For example, on a paper about tragedy, you might choose topics like ‘power’ and ‘death’, but on a paper about love you could pick ‘family’ and ‘gender’. If you will be comparing texts in the exam, then try and choose the same topics for all the texts, to make things easier. I would say three to five topics per text and two or three quotes for each (min 6, max 15 quotes per text) would be about right, depending how confident you feel in them. This doesn’t sound like that many, but it is actually a lot to learn, while being enough for the exam. Remember you only need one good quote per paragraph. By ‘good’ quote, I mean one that gives you a lot to talk about; quotes that overlap topics are especially good (as you’ll have fewer to learn), but so are quotes which have a strong narrative voice, feature a recurring motif, or use an interesting metaphor - all of these are things on which you might comment about the text as a whole as well as in relation to the quote itself.Once you have chosen your quotes, I would suggest copying them out a few times - colour coding by text and/or theme can be helpful, or making tables or mind-maps for each text – and then practising by reciting them or writing them down from memory. Getting somebody to test you is good. Once you think you know them, try some past paper questions (or even just plans) in which you try and use them. If you don’t feel confident, maybe find some more, but better to start with a few good ones and see how far you get than overwhelm yourself trying to learn hundreds of quotes. If you can include any critical quotes about genre/form/key concepts, that would impress the examiner, but they are only secondary, so don’t get caught up on them. My advice would be to only think about learning them once you feel comfortable with your primary quotes. If you use critical quotes, it should be to help you make a point, which you will need to evidence with quotes from the primary texts, and explain/analyse in your own words in answer to the question.