More Tips on Paper 1

1. You've only got 90 mins. You're not expected to do everything.
2. Personal response is not relating things to your own experiences. It's coming up with an original interpretation - saying what the poem means.
3. There is no one 'right' way to write an answer.
4. You can be explicit about the fact that you don't understand the cultural context of the piece - remember you don't have to! Even the most complex and culturally-specific texts are still stories at heart. Let's say you're a student in Australia and you're given an extract from Martin Booth's 'Gweilo'. You don't know anything about HK, the history, the politics, the racial tensions, colonialism, anything - acknowledge this! But then approach it like any other story - you've got a young boy, lost in a big city he doesn't understand but who has a will to discover. You've got a father who hangs on to his old identity at the expense of his relationships. Etc. Etc. Break each story down into its basic structure, its basic elements, its central ideas. You'll then be able to analyse even if you don't know the specifics of the situation about which the text is written, and you can be open about this to the examiner.

For more on this last point, investigate structuralism as a way of accessing a text.