Hi guys, so I have my context SAC next week (On Foe, for Whose Reality), and I was just wondering if this example would be enough of a link back to Foe:
There's a character in Foe named "Friday", who starts dancing around the house in the novel, and becomes completely unresponsive when doing this. The protagonist Susan eventually concludes that he does this to escape reality. In my piece, (if I get a prompt that has something to do with coping with reality or creating illusions), I was thinking of writing about a young autistic boy, named "Freddy", being bullied at school (from the mother's perceptive), and talking about how he's started dancing around the grass at lunch and recess, which results in him being able to block out the bullies, and hence becoming significantly happier.
Obviously I would need other examples in my piece to get to 900+ words, but would this example alone be enough of a link back to Foe? Thanks everyone 
That sounds really cool, actually!
First thing's first: for your Context SACs you'll have the chance to write a Statement of Intention/ Written Explanation in which you justify the choices that you've made and flesh out the links between your piece and the context/ prompt/ set text. It's a tricky thing to talk about because each school (and sometimes even each teacher) handles it differently, so you might be told that the S.O.I. is hugely important and determines your overall mark, or that it doesn't even matter and you just have to do it to satisfy the requirement. There are even some schools that don't make students do it at all (which is against VCAA's regulations but I ain't namin' no names cause I ain't no snitch...)
Point being: with the advantage of a S.O.I. where you can drop the pretense of a story at the end and just say 'I've written an imaginative narrative that takes inspiration from
Foe's character Friday in order to show...' - there'll be no doubt what you were trying to say. HOWEVER:
a) your teacher may not give much credence to the S.O.I. and will prefer it if they can just read your story and understand the links. i.e. if they need to read the S.O.I. to get the connection, then your piece has failed in some regard because...
b) you won't get the chance to write an S.O.I. in the exam! This doesn't mean you have to ditch this narrative completely, but it might mean that you'll need to adapt your story so that the connections are extremely obvious, just in case.
The two tips I have for you:
- make sure that's not
all your piece is exploring. The fact that you've noted you'll "need other examples" tells me you probably already know this, but the creative stories that just retell the plot of the set text by changing a few details around whilst conveying exactly the same message don't tend to be very impressive.
It's kind of like how, if you were studying
The Titanic, and you wrote a piece with identical-ish characters only it's set on a plane in the year 2012 instead of 1912. You're not really doing anything different with the
ideas of that text. Contrast this with a piece that follows
The Titanic's narrative but adopts the POV of one of those selfish characters who pushes others out of the way to get onto a lifeboat. Then the story continues from their perspective as they have to contemplate the enormity of their actions and the fact that they prioritised their own lives above others'. Originally, the film explores an act of selflessness, so by looking at the flip side of that, you're
furthering the discussion rather than limiting yourself to the ideas evident in the film.
- & this may or may not suit you, but something that can be very effective if well executed is using some of the language of the text in your own writing. You can do this verbatim just to ensure some fairly obvious links to the set text, or you can modify and recontextualise them to add depth to your story. eg. the line "He does not know what freedom is" which is fairly central in
Foe could be said by Freddy's mother in your story while she watches him dance after dropping him off at school that day. Or you might even change it to "He knows what freedom is" if you wanted to put a different spin on it.
^That kind of stuff is great to explore in your S.O.I. too, if you so desire.
This suggests these people did not feel the devotion the reader would typically associate with "owner[ s ]" and their pets. The implication being that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature. This has the effect of emphasising how great this cruelty was.
The bolded bit isn't a sentence according to some feedback I got from my teacher.
My question is this:
1) Why isn't it a sentence?
2) How do I make it into a sentence? I want to keep the word "implication" but I have no idea how to actually use it in a sentence apparently.
Fair warning, I have written the equivalent of a postgrad thesis on the question 'what is a sentence?' at uni, and it's the kind of surprisingly open-ended question that keeps academic linguists up at night, but I'll try and break this down:
The implication being that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature.The golden rule (in English and about 98% of documented languages worldwide) is that a sentence must have
two things: a
noun phrase and a
verb phrase. Or, in less jargon-y terms: a
thing and
stuff that happens to that thing.
For example:
She is a talented bellydancer.
He laughs a lot.
The Czech Republic recently
changed its name to Czechia.
Through this,
the author highlights the brutality of mankind.
Red = Noun Phrases / 'things'
Green = Verb Phrases / 'stuff that happens'
All of the sentences above are totally grammatical. The first two are more straightforward since we've got our 'thing' (she/he respectively) that the whole sentence is focussing on. In the first sentence we need to include the stuff that comes after the verb 'is' (because we can't just say 'She is' unless we're trying to say 'She exists' but we're trying to say 'She is a bellydancer' so we need that other information). In the second sentence, though, 'a lot' is more omitable since we could still convey the main gist of the sentence 'He laughs' without it.
The third example is similar to the first in that we need the information that comes after the verb 'changed,' but we don't really need 'recently.' So we can include stuff in between the noun phrase and the verb phrase if we want to. Finally, the last sentence has some optional information at the start of the sentence (i.e. 'Through this,') in the form of a linking phrase.
Compare these sentences to:
She a bellydancer.
Laughs he a lot.
The Czech recently
changed Republic its name to Czechia.
Through this,
highlighting the brutality of mankind.
NONE of these are grammatical! The first is missing a verb phrase. The second has the verb phrase occurring
before the noun phrase. The third has a verb phrase
interrupting the noun phrase, and the fourth is missing a noun phrase.
So the rules are:
- Every sentence must have a 'thing'/NP and 'stuff that happens to the thing'/VP
- The NP must come BEFORE the VP
- There can be information BETWEEN the NP and the VP but not WITHIN them.
- Other additional and omittable information can occur before or after the NP and VP.
Now let's consider your sentence:
The implication being (?) that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature.'The implication' is fine as an NP so you don't have to change that. The problem comes with your choice of VP.
The verb 'being'
can't occur on its own; it needs another verb.Try and use 'being' in a sentence as a verb. You'll likely come up with something like:
- I hate being so forgetful.
- I am used to being left out.
- My pen is being very difficult right now.
- You are just being silly.
In every one of these sentences, there's another verb involved.
Spoiler
- I hate being so forgetful.
- I am used to being left out.
- My pen is being very difficult right now.
- You are just being silly.
'Being' as a verb is something that adds additional information to a verb (and basically emphasises the present tense, but we won't get into that). So using 'being' without another verb is kind of like using the word 'the' without anything after it.
The is that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature.Sounds weird, right?
The easiest change we can make to this sentence would be:
The implication being is that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature....though there are a few other possible alternatives that could work, so feel free to run them by me if you're unsure.
tl;dr:
Your original version isn't a sentence because the verb isn't right. It would be okay if it were tacked onto a previous statement like:
The author suggests that their suffering is "manifold;" the implication being that the deprivation these animals endure is not only physical but also psychological in nature. But as a standalone sentence, it is incomplete.
I can't tell if that was too vague or too extensive but please let me know if any of that didn't make sense and I'll do my best to explain things. I know it can be really tough when you're told your intuitions are wrong and you can't work out why, and correcting false impressions is one of the hardest things to fix, but good on you for isolating this concern. Hopefully that process above will help you work out where you're going wrong.
Hi literally lauren
I pm you about some English confusions, are you able to help me out?
thanks
Post on the forums and I should get back to you sooner
Home
Help
Search
Login
