Exams and the build-up to them can be a stressful period, especially if you are about to sit your first major exams, such as the leaving certificate. Essay writing, in particular, is a very lengthy section of the exam that worries its fair share of students due to its unpredictable nature.
You do have wiggle room with this one, though, and you can either write a piece of fiction, a personal essay or a letter/speech.
Few subjects will require you to write as much as the Leaving Cert English Exam, and the essay question is a massive contributor to that. Once you get past the idea of having to write almost from the moment you open your exam papers right up until you are instructed to put your pen down, you're going to want to know how you can use your time as productively as possible.
The personal essay is a great opportunity for students to put themselves ahead and maximise their chances of getting that H1 when they open up their results envelope after the summer.
By keeping the marking scheme in mind as you craft your story, you can leave chance out of the equation and bank on catching the interest of the examiner in correcting your paper.
In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know to be awarded top marks for your personal essay.
Understanding the Marking Scheme
There’s good reason for students and teachers around the country to consider the Personal essay to be the ‘make or break’ section of the Leaving Cert English Exam.
For starters, if you were to look at the marks that are going for the essay, you’ll soon realise that if you were to slip up on this part of the paper, you would be fighting an uphill battle thereafter. The essay is worth 100 of the 200 marks that are up for grabs in paper one of the exam.
This means that it's worth 25% of your overall grade, so it certainly warrants your attention when preparing to sit the exam!
To prepare for the personal essay question to the best of your ability, your preparation shouldn’t start with any extensive amount of writing. Instead, you will want to inform yourself about how this section of the exam is graded.
By understanding what the examiner will be looking for when they review your essay over the summer months, you’ll be able to put yourself in a better position to achieve the grade you deserve.
When the examiner reads through your paper, they won’t just be deciding whether your essay is good or bad and slapping a grade in the top corner.
This is why knowing the marking scheme in advance is so important. The Leaving Certificate English marking scheme uses the PCLM framework to assess four main areas: Purpose (30%), Coherence (30%), Language (30%), and Mechanics (10%).
So, keep in mind that they’ll be looking out for how well you participate in answering the question while staying focused throughout your essay. Your writing should flow naturally with logical paragraph organisation and smooth transitions between ideas. The pace is also important. You don’t want to spend pages building up to a seemingly rushed ending.
Your examiner won’t want to have to read through a story full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.
Keeping these in check throughout your essay will ensure you walk out of the exam hall with some marks in the bag. Looking for specific sections? check out our article on the leaving cert fiction texts!
Mastering Essay Structure
We touched on the importance of having a well-structured personal essay and how it can transform ordinary writing into an outstanding piece.
Let's investigate how you can follow a clear pattern that will help guide your examiner through your thoughts in a way that persuades them to give you that H1.
Strong topic sentences should introduce the main idea of each body paragraph.
You need 6-8 detailed sentences that develop your point with relevant examples and personal insights.
The paragraphs should maintain a confessional, reflective tone throughout. Your body paragraphs need smooth transitions to flow naturally. The narrative arc should guide readers from one idea to the next.
The idea is for each paragraph to build on the previous one and create a coherent experience through your personal reflection.
In order to leave your examiner with plenty of reasons to award you with a top grade, you’re going to want to finish strong and wrap things up with an impactful conclusion that helps you stand out from the countless other exams they’ll be sat at home correcting.
To achieve this, you’ll want to leave a good 10-15% of your total essay length to make sure you’ve enough room to tie everything together.
Make sure to avoid endings that examiners dread getting, like “it was all a dream”. You don’t want to leave a sour taste in their mouth after putting all that effort into crafting the perfect personal essay.
For more detail on the poetry section, read our guide to leaving cert poetry.
Crafting Compelling Language
It is not enough for your personal essay to be well-written grammatically to be successful. Through your word choices and the literary devices you use throughout your essay, you’ll be communicating to the examiner what kind of English student you are, and it will certainly go a long way in how they connect with your writing.
While you won’t be able to predict the prompt you see when you flick open your exam paper for the Paper 1 Leaving Cert English exam, you will be able to prepare some impressive phrases that will help you secure those crucial mechanics marks and improve the examiner's overall impression of your essay.
So, spending some time crafting a couple of similes or metaphors to describe a character naturally throughout your story will certainly pay off when it comes to the grading process.
Reading is a great way to get fresh vocabulary to sprinkle throughout your personal essay.
It is not necessary to read entire novels to increase your vocabulary; even short stories or daily articles can be beneficial. When making notes of synonyms for keywords in mind maps, one is able to increase his/her vocabulary. Educational content in the form of vocabulary videos helps you learn new words to incorporate into your writing.
Note that fancy words alone won't carry you to success, just like toppings alone don’t make a good cake, but they certainly add to the overall presentation and appeal! Want to learn how to write a better essay? Check out the Superprof guide to writing an English Essay!
Practice your Time Management
This brings us to another top tip: time management! Running out of time is a really common problem for students sitting their English leaving cert exams! This is especially a problem for students who didn’t practice past exam papers, so they end up writing far too much for the first questions, not leaving themselves enough time to answer the other ones.
The best way to practice this is not just to give yourself the same amount of time as you would have.
You might have to start with more and work your way down, but that’s ok, more practice for you, but you should also break down the individual sections.
For example, the unseen poetry question should take no more than 25 minutes, while the comparative study might take an hour!
All students are different, and there is no special formula that helps everyone, but these timings exist as a general rule, and if you tweak them slightly, you can find the time management that suits you!
Do not feel disheartened if you go way overtime at the start either, you will keep cutting it down, and after you have done enough, by the time you sit your English leaving cert exam, you will have it down to a minute!
There are two papers in the English exam. You'll find the personal essay when you open up the English paper!
H1 Personal Essay Examples
You can have your personal essay decked out with all the bells and whistles, but if your story is lacking, there’s not a lot you can do. So, to ensure you lay the foundation for a great essay, let’s take a look at some H1-worthy concepts that have earned students top marks in the past.
Most essay prompts will encourage you to reflect a little about your life, qualities and interests.
One student earned an H1 in their essay by writing about their love of reading, showing how different books shaped who they became.
You can see right away how this essay invites so many opportunities to connect personal experiences with deeper life lessons while keeping a thoughtful tone. With so many papers to correct, an examiner will gladly read any essay with an authentic voice and will be far more likely to dish out a high grade than a generic essay that might as well have been copied and pasted.
One more brilliant example focused on moments of clarity and discovery. The student wrote about their father's relationship and shared deep insights about how fragile life can be. Without a doubt, this essay stood out because it turned everyday experiences into meaningful thoughts about human nature and growth.
Top-scoring essays share several key features. To name just one example, high-scoring pieces often dealt with themes like self-doubt, identity, and major life changes.
So, when you get around to drafting your essays, it certainly makes sense to keep these on your checklist. If you would rather focus on the second paper, check out our guide to English paper two.
Check Out Past Exam Papers
The layout of the English leaving cert rarely changes, which is beneficial for those who love to prepare and hate the unknown exams can sometimes bring. The Irish State Examinations committee knows how stressful exams can be, and they offer a very helpful service that lets you see all of the past English exams!
Not only is this super helpful when it comes to studying past trends and guessing what might come up, but it also allows you to do “mock” exams, and this is pretty much the best study you can do for an exam.
You can focus on specific sections of the English exams too, maybe you feel like you can improve your unseen poetry, so you go over and over the different questions, whatever the section, you have access to them all.
This also gives you the opportunity to test yourself on timing in an exam setting. One top tip we recommend is to set a stopwatch to the same time you would have in the leaving cert, and try to complete the exam; the more you do this, the better your time management becomes!
We also cover the comparative question in more detail, read our tips to getting the most out of the comparative question!
How to Prepare For Your Personal Essay
To stack the odds in your favour, you might want to consider working with an experienced tutor from Superprof and making a H1 standard draft essay that you can adapt to a variety of prompting questions from past exam papers. Make sure you know what kind of writer you are, and choose the one that best suits you.
If you would rather have a personal essay, choose something you know very well, so you won’t have to spend any time thinking about what you are going to say, and you can focus on how you are going to say it. This is also a chance for you to show your own personal writing style, something that the examiner could appreciate!
Remember, you can also pre-prepare for this. Have a rough idea for an essay that you know how to write inside out, off by heart, but leave some factors changeable so you can mould it to fit the question!
Maybe you have characters in your head, and you can expand on them, but the setting is kept loose, so you can use it to fit into a variety of questions.
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