ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: rowshan on August 05, 2008, 05:49:04 pm
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Does anyone know how to go about answering these essay topics while including the wider implications in the answer?
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Recently a VCAA exam assessor came to our school to talk about 'Shark Net'. To answer your question briefly, you don't necessarily have to talk about your text; you can draw from it ie talk about personal events/issues that relate to your text, and importantly, pertinent to your topic.
For example, she gave us an example of a student's work where the student didn't even mention her text once.
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do you still have that example to post up?
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Recently a VCAA exam assessor came to our school to talk about 'Shark Net'. To answer your question briefly, you don't necessarily have to talk about your text; you can draw from it ie talk about personal events/issues that relate to your text, and importantly, pertinent to your topic.
For example, she gave us an example of a student's work where the student didn't even mention her text once.
I thought you couldn't do that.
Maybe she wrote about a movie, or another book that is part of the context.
For encountering conflict we have to write about one of or all of the crucible, the line, and Omagh
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you do not have to refer to your texts at all in writing in context.
you just have to make sure you use ideas presented in the text and that of your context.
i got a 30/30 for my context and did not refer to 'Fly Away Peter' at all. Instead i drew ideas brought out by the novel and from the context of the imaginative landscape.
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you dont have to mention your text explicitly. like if your doing a poem you dont go "then the fly away peter spoke to me in silent words which permeated through the room like a resounding gong" it just sounds crap. you have to focus on the ideas presented, for example the crucible is about the witch hunts/mccarthyism yeah? (thats what my friend told, i'm doing frost and Fly Away Peter) so you do something relating to paranoia for instance and suspiscion or something similar... stuff like that.
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but just watch out for in the exam that ur link to ur text is pretty much dead obvious. you dont have a written explanation to explain yourself so everything u write should have its purpose pretty much at face value
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yeh my teacher has drilled that in our heads lol
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That is a fairly interesting. I find that it is much easier to write context essays if it is not confined to discussing just the book. Extensive wider reading is required, lol, it hard to find time for that shit.
Why doesn't VCAA personal visit my school? not fair! Hmph! Maybe because i go to government school?
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it doesn't have to be confined to discussing the book, but vcaa states there must be a predominate text which is one of the set texts within your essay. so sure, go ahead with using other material as evidence or inspiration, but don't base your whole piece on it
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So its the ideas in the text that really matter right? for example "the line" espouses the view that conflict promotes social solidarity, could i use this idea and not actually mention that it is from the line when responding to the prompt? If in a creative you are allowed to do that why cant I do the same in a expository or persuasive? :-\
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you dont have to mention your text explicitly. like if your doing a poem you dont go "then the fly away peter spoke to me in silent words which permeated through the room like a resounding gong" it just sounds crap. you have to focus on the ideas presented, for example the crucible is about the witch hunts/mccarthyism yeah? (thats what my friend told, i'm doing frost and Fly Away Peter) so you do something relating to paranoia for instance and suspiscion or something similar... stuff like that.
We got told that we had to explicitly mention the text (The Line) at least 6 times in our SAC. What I did was during the introduction I just mentioned "Throughout Arch and Martin Flanagans text 'The Line', we see how conflict can..."
and then throughout the main body paragraphs I then mentioned a few examples from the text to support my views..
however, the main idea of my essay was pretty much my own ideas about the context and was not directly pulled from the text we were studying.
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It really depends on what style. In an expository, you're probably best to just directly reference the book as evidence, whilst in a persuasive, since often it would not suit your purposes to mention a fictional work since it is quite awkward as evidence, perhaps use the key ideas presented in the book and arrange them in such a way that it is quite obvious what it is referring to. Similar for creative. All in all, I'd say the safest way is just to adopt a piece of writing from within your book such as a newspaper article analysing the events or something, and you won't be penalised for lacking connection.
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Another thign you could do is take direct quotes out of the text and incorporate them in your text. Like, if you have FAP then a quote like "this was the way he saw the world- on two levels" or whatever it is, would work really well within a imaginative piece about perspective or the relationship between man and nature or something. An obvious connection to the text which doesn't dominate or diminish your piece. (If it's imaginative)
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but just watch out for in the exam that ur link to ur text is pretty much dead obvious. you dont have a written explanation to explain yourself so everything u write should have its purpose pretty much at face value
Just a little bit about that which you might find interesting. In the exam you actual get space to plan out your context piece, which the assessor will almost definitely read. Just thinking logically about it then even if they're not supposed to change the mark because of that section it certainly can't hurt your chances. If I was reading it then read the plan and it was actually quite good where they were going with it then I'd be more inclined to give them a better mark.
Also I didn't mention Enduring Love once in any 3 of my context pieces. I got 80% and forgot one of my written explanations. So I guess it can't be extremely horrible to not mention it.
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In the exam you actual get space to plan out your context piece, which the assessor will almost definitely read.
I'm not sure if that's totally correct. Assessors take 3-4 minutes to correct one essay and I highly doubt that they would read a plan; they just don't have time and I thought in any subject they never read any plans...
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Just a little bit about that which you might find interesting. In the exam you actual get space to plan out your context piece, which the assessor will almost definitely read.
Also I didn't mention Enduring Love once in any 3 of my context pieces. I got 80% and forgot one of my written explanations. So I guess it can't be extremely horrible to not mention it.
From what I've heard from an assessor, they only read plans in the most desperate of situations; such as a student only doing 2 out of the 3 essays on the exam (yes it happens quite often) and only doing a plan for the last. From this, the examiner might give up to around a.....2 out of 10? Lets hope none of us fall into that.
And for getting 80% without mentioning Enduring Love, thats for a SAC where your teacher might not have even cared, or gave you the benefit of the doubt since they know what to look for and might spot the indirect links you've put throughout. Examiners on the other hand won't be trying to look for any loose links.
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No it is good to refer to your text eg/I'm doing Witness & Bombshell i have atleast give one example relating to my text and also mention a accorance in society it then shows examiers that you understand your text...
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I don't know exactly who you were trying to refute but yeh, it specifies clearly that you MUST have a key text. So sure, chuck in the current events and so on that relate to the prompt and your text, but that doesn't mean trying to show off by having predominately supplementary material and such. Even 50/50 is pushing it I'd say.
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Just a little bit about that which you might find interesting. In the exam you actual get space to plan out your context piece, which the assessor will almost definitely read.
Also I didn't mention Enduring Love once in any 3 of my context pieces. I got 80% and forgot one of my written explanations. So I guess it can't be extremely horrible to not mention it.
From what I've heard from an assessor, they only read plans in the most desperate of situations; such as a student only doing 2 out of the 3 essays on the exam (yes it happens quite often) and only doing a plan for the last. From this, the examiner might give up to around a.....2 out of 10? Lets hope none of us fall into that.
And for getting 80% without mentioning Enduring Love, thats for a SAC where your teacher might not have even cared, or gave you the benefit of the doubt since they know what to look for and might spot the indirect links you've put throughout. Examiners on the other hand won't be trying to look for any loose links.
Ah, i go to the same school as Dr. Whom and i know for a fact that the teachers care about every SAC we do. You don't have to directly refer to the text, because the study design clearer states that you need to draw on the 'ideas and arguments presented in your selected text.' That is why the AOS is called 'Context'. The best essays/pieces of writing IMO only refer to the actual events/character in the text a little bit, but draw heavily on the ideas raised to create a totally unique piece. That's why i love this unit so much. I wrote a piece for 'Whose Realty?' and it was all about Craig Nicholls (singer of The Vines) and how his autism affects his view of reality. I recieved full marks.
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Yeh, I know you can do that for a SAC since you have the benefit of a written explanation, I've done very similar things on half of the SAC pieces I've written so far, but in no way am I gonna take any gambles on the exam with some loose links like that given that I don't have a written explanation to explain how it relates. I'm just warning people against it because well yeh, I don't think you want to be caught on the wrong end of a badly structured (perhaps) coursework. (Not to say I don't like context, I just find the whole 'key text' thing at the end of year stupid, defies the whole point doesn't it?)
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I think the best thing to do in relation to contexts, is to find which style best suits you. For example, if you write 'the text critically evaluates', then you obviously wouldn't write imaginatively. Also, it is paramount to have some textual evidence, but to never consistently mention it. Remember, these are just meant to support your contention, and not develop your whole argument. Ultimately, you want to refer to the topic as much as you can, and add evidence wherever possible.
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It really depends on what style. In an expository, you're probably best to just directly reference the book as evidence, whilst in a persuasive, since often it would not suit your purposes to mention a fictional work since it is quite awkward as evidence, perhaps use the key ideas presented in the book and arrange them in such a way that it is quite obvious what it is referring to. Similar for creative. All in all, I'd say the safest way is just to adopt a piece of writing from within your book such as a newspaper article analysing the events or something, and you won't be penalised for lacking connection.
A real persuasive piece (eg: an editorial in the paper) would probably not include references to a fictional work. But since in the exam we are constrained by the fact that the piece must have some relevance to the studied texts, does it really seem likely that we will be penalised for using them?
At school my teacher said that the persuasive can be written by starting very general (adopting a global perspective) and gradually limiting this to the scope of the text. Has anyone heard anything different to this?
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Yeh I see your point but I'm pretty sure VCAA isn't stupid enough to cut off our options in using our texts. Like in the sample exam, the audience was the wider school community, and the piece was to be in a year 12 collection of work or something like that, so in that case, you could write pretty much ANYTHING and get away with it. This means even referring directly to your texts since it wouldn't be all that weird given that your audience has studied these texts as well etc. I'm pretty sure VCAA will remain pretty general for our exam too in that case.
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Anyone read the Age exam guide? It said, in big bold writing writing, that "it may be that no direct reference to a text is made and its influence is implicit."
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For context, I would suggest that you focus on ideas relevant on your context when studying your texts. When writing the actual thing, try and use personal experiences to express your own personal ideas. This may be hard for some people who are not as creative as others. Also, that you actually do know how to write what you are writing. Dont mix the conventions for say, persusive and expository. Apparently, they can be interchanged as some of the conventions actually actually overlap.
About using your text. I think they want you to write about what is prevalent in the text but not using the text itself. It is like writing an idea on a piece of paper than burning that paper. The paper is destroyed but the idea is not. As long as you can remember what was on the paper and not the paper itself, you can write your idea on a fresh piece of paper.
Hmm...i rather like my imagery, lol. Even if it might not make sense to anyone but me. Hahaha. Woot! Finished my first post on here. Hope it helps. ^^
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Yeh, but implicit means that the examiner still has to be able to find it. I'm not trying to argue that you CAN'T not directly mention them, I'm just saying it's a much safer option because I wouldn't be willing to risk my English score on the fact that the examiner didn't interpret the text, and the piece of writing that I end up writing the same way that I did (whose reality? =P). But look, if you're willing, or if your text style demands it, then go ahead. I've just been warned by an examiner, that particularly imaginative pieces end up getting quite bad because they just seem so irrelevant.