Hey guys,
I’m new to ATAR notes and I was wondering if anyone knew how to write a reflective commentary for a creative task in Literature, the minimum word limit is 700 words and I have no idea how to start let alone write that many words.
Hi Jazzy!
Have you started writing your creative piece yet? We might be able to give you some more specific advice for your commentary if you already know what your piece is going to be about (which text, which genre, etc)
In general, the point of the reflective commentary is to
show how much thought you've put into your creative! The aim is to go into heaps of detail about the
authorial choices you've made (if you do VCE Lit, you're an author now, congrats! Now you have to think like one
) Basically, your teacher doesn't want to just give the highest mark to the best imaginative writer in the class, so instead the task also involves a written explanation where you tell them what meaning your creative piece was intending to communicate, and what language features you used to do so. Marking schemes vary from school to school, but often, the explanation can actually be "worth more" than your creative itself, because...
• an AMAZING creative piece + an awful commentary =
bad mark, because this shows that the student doesn't actually understand the point of the task, or the value in what they've written
• an ~okay~ creative piece that's maybe a bit clunky or has more simplistic ideas + a GREAT reflective commentary that clearly explains authorial intent and language choices =
good mark! because you're showing that you did things deliberately and you put thought into what you wrote... even if it wasn't the next New York Times bestseller
Your teacher may have mentioned an acronym like FLAP or FLAPC designed to help you in the commentary:
•
Form: what form have you chosen (short story, poem, POV narrative, hybrid, etc.) and why? How does this form affect the language you use, and does it create meaning in some way (e.g. a stream of consciousness short story might be written without paragraphs to imply an inextricable train of thoughts strung together, or dialogue might be short and choppy, rapidly switching from character to character to suggest emotional volatility and tension)
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Language: (this is probs the most important one!) what literary devices have you used, and, more broadly, what kinds of language choices have you made? Why do the characters talk in the way they do? Have you used basic, technical, flowery, or colloquial vocabulary? What are your sentence structures like, and do you change the kinds of language you use at all throughout the piece? This is your chance to really show off as a Lit student! You can use any kind of techniques you like... so long as you have a really solid explanation for them here.
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Audience: who is the target audience of your piece? (And don't write "my teacher"
) What sort of reader can you imagine enjoying your work, or where could you see this piece appearing? (e.g. in an anthology of works by Australian immigrants, in a museum collection of literature found in Eastern Europe, in an autobiography by someone noteworthy, etc.)
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Purpose: this one is a little tricky, as it's quite different from the 'contention' explained below. Your purpose is basically the reason why a piece like this would exist. For instance, it might be a POV narrative where a character is trying to work through an issue they're facing, so this piece exists to showcase their fraught emotional state at this difficult junction of their life. On the other hand, if you wanted to write a letter from one character to another, you'd simply explain why that one character would want to write that letter.
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Contention: in contrast to the above, this section is where YOU, as a Year 12 student, tell your teacher what you were aiming to achieve as an author.
(this is the other very important part! You should use lots of first person pronouns (e.g. 'In my piece, I tried to create a sense of...' 'In doing X, my intention was to...' 'My decision to do X was in effort to...') You also need to talk about the connections to your set texts - what similarities and differences are there between it and your creative? Is it a very similar piece where you emulate the author's writing style, and write about the same characters in the same circumstances, or is it completely different and only thematically connected to the original?
This isn't an exhaustive list, but hopefully these questions can help you get started!
P.S. I used to hate writing reflective commentaries (since it always felt like just spelling out the obvious) until someone told me to think of it as
writing a close analysis, but about your own work! So pull apart quotes, talk about the author's message, and be super analytical. That way, it's as easy as writing a regular Lit essay... except even easier, because YOU'RE the author, so you can answer your own questions!