Blurting: An Amazing Revision Technique for Top Grades
What is blurting?
The idea behind blurting is that you write as much as you can about a topic in 3-5 minutes, non-stop, without thinking or editing.
This will test your memory, but also link your ideas together in interesting and more memorable ways.
Once finished, you need to check your notes, books, specification etc to find what you have missed. That quickly identifies what you should revise next. So, it is super efficient in building memory and reducing your time spent revising.
Here’s an example from my YouTube short, using Macbeth. I used the dictation app in Notes on my iPhone, for even greater efficiency.
Mr Salles wanted to show off everything that he could do in three minutes, using his dictation app. This is a fantastic way for you to revise. It means that you can get your ideas down as quickly as possible.
Here goes, Macbeth is a fascinating study in guilt. Macbeth himself never seems to feel guilty about what he’s done, and Shakespeare contrast that with Lady Macbeth who does feel guilty, and obsesses about cleaning the non-existent blood on her hand.
This is obviously a metaphor for the sins she’s committed, and that’s why she keeps referring to going to hell. Shakespeare does this to pander to his audiences Christianity, and their belief that Simons should be punished. It’s also A patriarchal punishment. He wants to make clear that women deserve to be punished if they transgress against the rules that they’ve been given by society. Perhaps Shakespeare wants us to feel some sympathy for Lady Macbeth, because she has to react violently to reject the constraints that society puts on her.
On the other hand, Shakespeare might also share societies prejudices. We can test this out by looking at the witches. They too are ostracised by society because of their sin in trying to persuade Macbeth to commit murder.
But when we look more closely, we realise that they never tell Macbeth to do anything, least of all to commit murder. In fact, when Macbeth appears later in the party one of the witches says by the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this Way comes. In other words the wickedness in the play is Macbeth himself.This suggests that Shakespeare’s main attack is against man’s capacity for violence and evil, rather than women’s attempt to gain control in society. Looked at from this perspective, we can see that the witches are almost powerless to improve their own lives. All they can do is prophesy is what will happen to other characters, and then watch them destroy themselves, because they are the characters with power. The witches have no power in society because, as we are told, they have beards and look like men. This appearance excludes them from any kind of power in Shakespeare’s society, when women could only achieve independence through marriage, which would depend on both their appearance and the wealth of their families.
That was as much as I could blurt in 3 minutes. I’ve sped it up for you both to show the power of this technique, and also to show how fantastic the dictation app is on your phone, or your iPad.
387 words in 3 minutes! And that included the punctuation which I dictated as I went. I have made no corrections, so you can see for yourself any typical dictation errors. I’ve placed the errors in bold, as thinking hard about them will help you remember what I’ve written.
The other thing you would do is put quotation marks around the words I’m clearly quoting.
If this were your blurting example, you would next read through to see if you know any extra quotations which would fit your argument.
Finally, you would pick the quotations or examples you would need to for your next 3-5 minute blurt. That would give you 70-100% of a full essay, and you will have been blurting for 6-10 minutes! That’s the power of blurting.