36-Week WAEC Revision Programme — Literature-in-English
September to the May WAEC sitting. SS3 is not a year of new material so much as a year of pressure on material already met, so this is not a course to work through from the beginning — it is a testing programme. Each week you answer cold, work the ones you got wrong, and have the AI explain why you got them wrong. Anything you turn out never to have been taught, you learn there and then, and meet again three weeks later.
A week is one block of the syllabus and the prompts that cover it. You are not meant to do all of them: answer the questions first, and let what you get wrong decide which of the rest you need. Fifteen or twenty minutes a subject is a real week's work — nine subjects do not fit any other way.
Three prompts in each topic are free to try before you subscribe. One subscription opens everything this guide links to.
Every week, in this order
Start with the questions, not the explanation. The first two steps are in every week; a purpose-written mistake or pitfalls prompt appears in about half of them, and where it does not, your own wrong answers are the material for step three.
- 1. Retrieve — Answer cold, with nothing in front of you. Wrong answers are the point — they show you where the week's work is.
- 2. Drill — Work the ones you missed properly, showing every step, so you and the AI can both see where it went wrong.
- 3. Explain my error — Ask why your answer was wrong, not just what the right one is. Where the week offers a Spot My Mistake or WAEC Pitfalls prompt, use it.
- 4. Teach me — Only if the error turns out to be something you were never taught. Then come back and retrieve it again.
Literary Foundations
↑ Jump to week- Week 1
- Quiz: Simile, metaphor and personification
- WAEC prep: Symbolism, allusion and satire
- Practice set: Naming the device at work in given quotations
- Spot my mistake: Calling every comparison a metaphor even where the word like or as is present
- Let me explain: Irony and its kinds: verbal, dramatic and situational
- Teach me: The three genres of literature and what marks each out
- Week 2
- Quiz: Characterisation: round, flat, static and dynamic characters
- WAEC prep: Setting and theme in a novel
- Practice set: Analysing the elements at work in a short extract
- Spot my mistake: Treating a first-person narrator's opinions as the novelist's own view
- Let me explain: Point of view and the narrator's position
- Teach me: Plot and the stages of its development
- Week 3
- Quiz: Dialogue, monologue and soliloquy
- WAEC prep: Stagecraft: setting, props, costume and lighting
- Practice set: Analysing a scene for its dramatic technique
- Spot my mistake: Treating a soliloquy as a monologue spoken to another character on stage
- Let me explain: Dramatic irony and how a playwright uses it
- Teach me: The structure of a play from exposition to denouement
- Week 4
- Quiz: Rhyme, rhythm and metre
- WAEC prep: Poetic forms: sonnet, ode, elegy and ballad
- Practice set: Scanning a stanza and describing its music
- Spot my mistake: Treating rhyme and rhythm as the same feature of a poem
- Let me explain: Alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia
- Teach me: Imagery and the senses a poet appeals to
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 5
- Quiz: Identifying the subject matter of a passage
- WAEC prep: Answering questions on style in an unseen passage
- Practice set: A timed unseen prose exercise of 120 to 150 words
- Spot my mistake: Retelling what happens in an unseen passage instead of answering the question asked about it
- Let me explain: Finding tone and mood in unfamiliar prose
- Teach me: How to read an unseen passage under exam pressure
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 6
- Quiz: Finding the theme of an unfamiliar poem
- Quiz: The events leading to the battle of Actium
- WAEC prep: Commenting on the devices in an unseen poem
- Practice set: A timed unseen poetry exercise
- WAEC prep: The contrast between Rome and Egypt as settings
- Practice set: Tracing the plot from Act 1 to the deaths
- Spot my mistake: Assuming the persona of a poem is always the poet speaking in their own voice
- Spot my mistake: Treating two contrasting settings in a play as mere locations rather than as opposed values
- Let me explain: Identifying the persona and the tone
- Let me explain: The theme of duty against desire
- Teach me: The order in which to approach an unseen poem
- Teach me: The opening situation and Antony's position in Egypt
Revisit from three weeks ago
Antony and Cleopatra
↑ Jump to week- Week 7
- Quiz: Cleopatra's shifting moods and her power
- Quiz: Placing a quotation in its scene and speaker
- WAEC prep: Enobarbus and his function in the play
- Practice set: Writing a character sketch with textual evidence
- WAEC prep: Commenting on the significance of a quoted passage
- Spot my mistake: Writing a character sketch as a list of adjectives with no evidence from the text
- Spot my mistake: Answering a context question without placing the extract
- Let me explain: Octavius Caesar as a political operator
- Let me explain: Explaining the meaning of a Shakespearean line
- Teach me: Antony as a soldier undone
- Teach me: What a context question asks for
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 8
- Quiz: The theme of tradition against personal choice
- WAEC prep: The theme of womanhood in the novel
- Practice set: Supporting a theme with evidence from the text
- Spot my mistake: Answering a question on theme by narrating the plot from beginning to end
- Let me explain: The theme of migration and belonging
- Teach me: The Sierra Leonean setting and what it contributes
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 9
- Quiz: The minor characters and what each reveals
- Quiz: The moments where the symbol is invoked
- WAEC prep: The language and humour of the novel
- Practice set: Analysing a passage of Hollist's prose for character and voice
- WAEC prep: The title and its relation to the theme
- Practice set: Writing on the symbol with scene evidence
- Spot my mistake: Describing what a character does when the question asks about the technique used to present them
- Spot my mistake: Treating a symbol as carrying one fixed meaning wherever it appears
- Let me explain: The narrative technique Hollist uses
- Let me explain: How the symbol carries the political meaning
- Teach me: Fina as the central character
- Teach me: What the elephant stands for in the play
Revisit from three weeks ago
African Prose
↑ Jump to week- Week 10
- Quiz: The theme of guilt and forgiveness
- WAEC prep: The theme of memory and the past
- Practice set: Linking setting to theme with evidence
- Spot my mistake: Treating forgiveness and forgetting as the same movement in a novel of reconciliation
- Let me explain: The theme of reconciliation
- Teach me: The Liberian setting after civil war
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 11
- Quiz: The antagonist and the burden he carries
- Quiz: The theme of racial prejudice
- WAEC prep: The language and imagery of the novel
- Practice set: Analysing a passage of Shaw's prose for character and viewpoint
- WAEC prep: The theme of courage in the novel
- Practice set: Using the mockingbird as a way into the themes
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a novel told through several viewpoints has no single controlling design
- Spot my mistake: Reading a novel set in the past as a record of events that actually happened
- Let me explain: Shaw's handling of multiple viewpoints
- Let me explain: The theme of innocence and its loss
- Teach me: Bendu as the central consciousness
- Teach me: Maycomb in the 1930s as a setting
Revisit from three weeks ago
Non-African Prose
↑ Jump to week- Week 12
- Quiz: Scout as narrator and as child
- WAEC prep: Harper Lee's use of a child's point of view
- Practice set: Analysing an extract for character and narrative voice
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a child narrator understands everything the reader is meant to understand
- Let me explain: Boo Radley and the reader's changing view of him
- Teach me: Atticus Finch and his moral position
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 13
- Quiz: The theme of suffering and endurance
- Quiz: The characters who shape his journey
- WAEC prep: The theme of hope against despair
- Practice set: Choosing quotations from Path of Lucas to support a theme
- WAEC prep: The language and tone of the novel
- Practice set: Analysing a passage of Bellefeuille's prose for character and tone
- Spot my mistake: Choosing quotations for their beauty rather than for what they prove
- Spot my mistake: Confusing the tone of a novel with the mood it creates in the reader
- Let me explain: The theme of family and duty
- Let me explain: The narrative structure Bellefeuille adopts
- Teach me: The setting of the novel and its atmosphere
- Teach me: Lucas as the central figure
Revisit from three weeks ago
Drama
↑ Jump to week- Week 14
- Quiz: The theme of leadership and power
- WAEC prep: Ademilua-Afolayan's dramatic technique
- Practice set: Analysing the elephant scene for staging and meaning
- Spot my mistake: Saying what a symbol stands for without showing where the text supports the reading
- Let me explain: The symbolism of the elephant
- Teach me: The setting of the play and its social world
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 15
- Quiz: Ananse as trickster and father
- Quiz: The theme of social responsibility
- WAEC prep: The theme of greed and the theme of marriage
- Practice set: Analysing the play's use of song and audience address
- WAEC prep: Priestley's use of dramatic irony and timing
- Practice set: Analysing the final twist and its effect
- Spot my mistake: Treating a play that addresses its audience directly as a failure of dramatic illusion
- Spot my mistake: Reading dramatic irony as any moment in a play that surprises the audience
- Let me explain: Anansegoro and how Sutherland shapes it
- Let me explain: Inspector Goole as a dramatic device
- Teach me: The Ghanaian setting and the storytelling frame
- Teach me: The Birling household in 1912 as a setting
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 16
- Quiz: More's conscience and the law
- WAEC prep: Bolt's dramatic structure and staging
- Practice set: Analysing a scene between More and Cromwell
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a play built on real historical figures is bound to follow the historical record
- Let me explain: The Common Man and his choric function
- Teach me: Tudor England as the setting of the play
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 17
- Quiz: The imagery of faces and masks in Once Upon a Time
- Quiz: The role of the storyteller in the play
- WAEC prep: Soyinka's Night and its imagery of oppression
- Practice set: Comparing the tone of the three poems
- WAEC prep: Audience address and the breaking of illusion
- Practice set: Analysing a passage of Anansegoro technique
- Spot my mistake: Treating a poem's subject matter as its theme
- Spot my mistake: Treating songs in a play as decoration rather than as part of its structure
- Let me explain: Kamara's New Tongue and cultural erosion
- Let me explain: Mboguo songs and their function
- Teach me: Okara's Once Upon a Time and the loss of sincerity
- Teach me: What Anansegoro is and where it comes from
Revisit from three weeks ago
African Poetry
↑ Jump to week- Week 18
- Quiz: The refrain in Not My Business and its effect
- WAEC prep: Cheney-Coker's The Breast of the Sea and its history
- Practice set: Analysing the imagery of the sea in Cheney-Coker
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a refrain carries the same weight on every repetition
- Let me explain: Afriyie-Vidza's Hearty Garlands as an occasional poem
- Teach me: Osundare's Not My Business and the cost of silence
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 19
- Quiz: The catalogue of false faces
- WAEC prep: Comparing the losses the two poems mourn
- Practice set: Writing a comparative answer on cultural change
- Spot my mistake: Writing two separate accounts when a question asks for a comparison
- Let me explain: The generation that abandons the old tongue in Kamara
- Teach me: The father's plea to his son in Okara's poem
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 20
- Quiz: The questions the persona throws at the reader
- Quiz: The new generation and its inward turn in New Tongue
- Quiz: Akanni, Danladi and Chinwe as the three victims
- WAEC prep: The restrained grief of The Stone
- Practice set: Comparing three very different poetic voices
- Practice set: The ending of Once Upon a Time and the wish to relearn how to laugh
- Practice set: The yam in the savouring mouth as an image of comfort
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a cheerful surface in a poem rules out a serious subject
- Let me explain: The deceptive cheerfulness of The Telephone Call
- Let me explain: The sea and clam imagery in Soyinka's Night
- Let me explain: Age eighty-five and the twilight imagery of Hearty Garlands
- Teach me: The defiant voice of Still I Rise
Revisit from three weeks ago
Non-African Poetry
↑ Jump to week- Week 21
- Quiz: The structure and rhyme of She Walks in Beauty
- Quiz: The repetition and imagery of Still I Rise
- WAEC prep: Heaney's Digging and the pen against the spade
- Practice set: Comparing tradition and inheritance across the poems
- WAEC prep: Gibson's The Stone and its treatment of grief
- Spot my mistake: Reading a first-person poem as autobiography and judging it true or false
- Spot my mistake: Reading The Telephone Call as a poem about luck
- Let me explain: Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale and its narrative
- Let me explain: Adcock's The Telephone Call and its irony
- Teach me: Byron's She Walks in Beauty and its imagery of light
- Teach me: Angelou's Still I Rise and its defiance
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 22
- Quiz: Act 2 and the alliance with Octavia
- WAEC prep: The turning point of the play and where it falls
- Practice set: Summarising the first three acts with key quotations
- Spot my mistake: Summarising a play act by act when the question asks where its turning point falls
- Let me explain: Act 3 and the disaster at Actium
- Teach me: Act 1 and Antony's divided loyalty
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 23
- Quiz: The death of Antony and its staging
- Quiz: Her contradictions and her theatricality
- WAEC prep: The significance of Cleopatra's chosen death
- Practice set: Summarising the closing acts with key quotations
- WAEC prep: Whether the play is her tragedy or Antony's
- Practice set: Arguing a case for Cleopatra as the tragic centre
- Spot my mistake: Treating the death of the title character as the end of a play's action
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a tragic figure must be admirable throughout for the tragedy to work
- Let me explain: Act 5 and Cleopatra's last scene
- Let me explain: Her relationship with her attendants
- Teach me: Act 4 and Antony's final defeat
- Teach me: What makes Cleopatra a tragic figure
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 24
- Quiz: The beast fable and what Chaucer does with the form
- Quiz: The dialogue form of The Telephone Call
- Practice set: The three generations of diggers in Heaney's poem
- Practice set: The woman's three days and nights of silence in The Stone
- Spot my mistake: Treating a beast fable as a story about animals rather than about people
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a poem written as dialogue has no persona of its own
- Let me explain: The sound imagery of spade and gravel in Digging
- Let me explain: The stonecutter as narrator of The Stone
- Teach me: Chanticleer and Pertelote as characters
- Teach me: The references to slavery and ancestry in Still I Rise
Revisit from three weeks ago
Mixed WAEC Practice
↑ Jump to week- Week 25
- Quiz: Egypt as pleasure, excess and feeling
- Quiz: The characters' differing attitudes to it
- WAEC prep: Characters who move between the two worlds
- Teach me: How the novel presents the practice
- WAEC prep: The author's stance and how it is conveyed
- Practice set: Building a paragraph on tradition using evidence from Hollist
- Spot my mistake: Reducing the conflict to a simple good and bad
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a novelist who presents a practice sympathetically must be endorsing it
- Let me explain: How the two worlds are set against each other in language
- Let me explain: The conflict between tradition and individual choice
- Teach me: Rome as duty, order and politics
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 26
- Quiz: What draws her back
- WAEC prep: The ending and what it resolves
- Practice set: Tracing the journey motif through the novel
- Spot my mistake: Treating a journey in a novel as movement between places rather than as a change in the traveller
- Let me explain: The theme of belonging in two places
- Teach me: Fina's life away from home
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 27
- Quiz: The effects of war on the characters
- WAEC prep: How the past intrudes on the present in the novel
- Practice set: Linking historical setting to the novel's meaning
- Spot my mistake: Calling an object that recurs in a novel a symbol without asking what it is made to carry
- Let me explain: The road itself as setting and symbol
- Teach me: How the war shapes the world of the novel
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 28
- Quiz: The possibility of forgiveness in the novel
- Quiz: The evidence and how Atticus dismantles it
- WAEC prep: Whether the novel offers hope
- Practice set: Building an essay on trauma and redemption
- WAEC prep: The aftermath of the trial
- Practice set: Writing on racial injustice with trial evidence
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a novel that ends without disaster is offering hope
- Spot my mistake: Writing on injustice in a novel from opinion alone with no evidence from the trial scenes
- Let me explain: What redemption means for each major character
- Let me explain: The verdict and what it reveals about Maycomb
- Teach me: How trauma is carried by the characters
- Teach me: The charge against Tom Robinson
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 29
- Quiz: The lessons Atticus teaches her
- Quiz: How grief is expressed in the novel
- WAEC prep: How her narration changes across the novel
- WAEC prep: Endurance as the novel's central value
- Practice set: Building an essay on grief with textual support
- Spot my mistake: Treating Scout's voice as the adult author's
- Spot my mistake: Assuming grief in a novel is shown only through what characters say about it
- Let me explain: What she learns from Boo Radley
- Let me explain: What sustains Lucas through his journey
- Teach me: Scout at the start of the novel
- Teach me: The losses Lucas suffers
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 30
- Quiz: The point of view and its effect on the reader
- WAEC prep: How structure serves the theme
- Practice set: Analysing the effect of a structural choice
- Spot my mistake: Confusing the order in which events happen with the order in which they are told
- Let me explain: Flashback and its use in the novel
- Teach me: How the narrative is organised in time
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 31
- Quiz: The pressures of modern life on that order
- Quiz: The schemes Ananse devises
- WAEC prep: How the conflict is resolved, if it is
- Practice set: Arguing which side the play favours
- WAEC prep: Ananse as father and as manipulator
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a play that dramatises a conflict must itself take a side in it
- Spot my mistake: Treating Ananse as a straightforward villain
- Let me explain: The characters who stand on each side
- Let me explain: Whether the audience is meant to admire him
- Teach me: The traditional order the play depicts
- Teach me: The trickster tradition Ananse belongs to
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 32
- Quiz: How each Birling contributed to Eva's death
- WAEC prep: Priestley's message and the year he wrote in
- Practice set: Writing on responsibility with quotation
- Spot my mistake: Treating a play's message as the opinion of whichever character speaks last
- Let me explain: The generational divide in the family's response
- Teach me: The Inspector's argument about shared responsibility
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 33
- Quiz: The questions of who or what he is
- Quiz: His use of silence as a legal defence
- WAEC prep: The effect of his final speech
- Practice set: Analysing his function rather than his identity
- WAEC prep: Whether More is heroic or obstinate
- Practice set: Arguing a case on More's conscience
- Spot my mistake: Spending an answer on who a character is when the question asks what they do in the play
- Spot my mistake: Assuming silence in a courtroom scene amounts to an admission
- Let me explain: His use of the photograph
- Let me explain: The pressure his family puts on him
- Teach me: How the Inspector controls the pace of the play
- Teach me: The oath More refuses and why
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 34
- Quiz: How he speaks to the audience
- WAEC prep: The contrast between him and More
- Practice set: Analysing a Common Man passage
- Spot my mistake: Treating a choric figure as an ordinary character inside the play's action
- Let me explain: What his survival says about the play's world
- Teach me: The roles the Common Man plays
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 35
- Quiz: The persona's helplessness in Night
- Quiz: The celebratory diction of Hearty Garlands
- WAEC prep: The final stanza of Not My Business and its warning
- Practice set: Comparing the political stance of the two poems
- WAEC prep: Sierra Leone's suffering in Cheney-Coker's poem
- Practice set: Comparing celebration and lament across the two
- Spot my mistake: Assuming a political poem must name the government it attacks to count as protest
- Spot my mistake: Treating every poem that mentions death as an elegy
- Let me explain: The disappearances in Not My Business
- Let me explain: The elegiac note in The Breast of the Sea
- Teach me: Soyinka's imagery of darkness and weight
- Teach me: What makes Hearty Garlands an occasional poem
Revisit from three weeks ago - Week 36
- Quiz: The movement from outward beauty to inward goodness
- WAEC prep: The pen as an inherited tool in Digging
- Practice set: Comparing how each poem uses physical detail
- Spot my mistake: Explaining an image by paraphrasing it rather than by saying what it does
- Let me explain: Heaney's memory of his father and grandfather
- Teach me: Byron's balance of dark and bright
Revisit from three weeks ago