Done!! (original) (raw)

I'd strongly recommend getting the Princeton Review book. It's about $16 in most university bookstores (or on Amazon), and working through that. I found it to be INCREDIBLY helpful.

Here's what I did: Worked through the PR book, right up to the end of the practice test. Then, I went through the answers, and read all of their explanations, as well as reading up on whatever they were talking about. Then, I went through Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena's notes. I made sure to look EVERYTHING up in Wikipedia and read all the shorter works as I could. That helped ENORMOUSLY!

PR, HL and VM gave me an idea about what to look for and what depth, while Wiki gave me a great crash-course in the things associated with that, such as dates, major life events, friends and connections, major works, etc. It also gave me a picture of a lot of the people, which really helped.

As far as what's on the test- I felt the PR book had a pretty accurate take on it. There are some flat-out ID questions on the text (such as: "who wrote the following three texts?" and then gave you three texts and five different authors. Brutal, but not too bad if you can place even one of them.

There were fewer trick questions on the actual test than on the PR practice test, but it was still really useful to approach the material as if there had been- it helped me make a lot of connections that were useful.

Finally, if you look at some long question and you have no idea as to the answers, glance at it and move on, but then come back. I was a little pressed for time at the end, found a section with five long passages and was told to assign them to three authors, and decided it was way too much time for too few points. I finished, came back to it, saw that one of the answers was Spenser and said "hey, I wonder if any of the passages are a Spenserian sonnet," went back and counted feet and sure enough! There was one, clearly a Spenserian sonnet and bang! Extra point in 20 seconds. So certainly go back and look at ones you skipped if you have the time for it.

Good luck!