<p>Use the 15 minutes primarily for the DBQ, but also look at the other essays and start thinking about them. You have one pre-French Revolution essay and one post-French Revolution essay (I believe), and you have three choices for each one. Think about what you’re strong at. Social trends, political trends, or economic trends? A particular country’s history? Just let the essays sit in the back of your brain as you spend the rest of the reading period on the DBQ. Spend a minute, tops, on this.</p>
<p>During this time I think you should do a couple of things for the DBQ after you briefly look at the other essays. Go through each document, and either underline the main point or scribble something down in the margins about the main point. This doesn’t have to be detailed: you are just looking at your sources, not writing your essay yet. Then think briefly about each author’s nationality, political views, or other information you may know (or that they tell you) about them and write a quick note about possible bias.</p>
<p>There’s multiple acronyms you can remember to help you group the documents. I was taught PARTIES for political, artistic, religious, technological, (something), economic, social. I’ve also heard SPERM for social, political, economic, religious, military (it may be immature but if it’s memorable then it works). You don’t have to use these: you can always come up with groups like (to use your example) “believes the poor should be helped by charity,” “believes the poor should help themselves,” “believes the poor should be helped by the government,” etc.</p>
<p>Then go through and get a very short, bare-bones outline (if you could even call it that) for your essay. Come up with three main points for your body paragraphs that somehow relate to the three groups you made. Write down the documents by number and identify them by a few words. Examples of this: “1 - wood carving,” “8 - Poor Law,” “4 - Malthus,” etc.</p>
<p>Note how much I repeated words emphasizing speed and brevity. The reading period is not for writing your essay, and more importantly you don’t need it be. Write quick notes to yourself to help you jog your memory when you’re fleshing out your essay. If you don’t know what’s going on in a document, think for a little bit, but don’t get hung up over it: you don’t need to use all of the documents. If you don’t know a potential source of bias for a document, skip it: you don’t need to talk about bias in every document.</p>
<p>Speed is key. You don’t have to write a lot during the reading period; in fact, you shouldn’t. Write notes in the margins that will help you with developing your essay once you start it.</p>
<p>This turned out way longer than I planned. Good luck!</p>