ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English Studies => Topic started by: EdwinaB19 on March 07, 2017, 07:26:28 am
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Hi. Since school started I've handed in five practice essays to my English teacher (we're allowed to hand in one a week for him to mark), and the feedback continues to get worse. A common comment is that my arguments and evidence don't go 'deep enough'.
This sounds terrible, but I usually receive very high marks for my essays, so I'm really unsure on how to improve right now. The jump between 1/2 and 3/4 English feels massive at the moment. I've got a SAC this Friday and we get the topics on Wednesday, what can I do to make my essays deeper and just generally better quality?
Thank you!
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Hi. Since school started I've handed in five practice essays to my English teacher (we're allowed to hand in one a week for him to mark), and the feedback continues to get worse. A common comment is that my arguments and evidence don't go 'deep enough'.
This sounds terrible, but I usually receive very high marks for my essays, so I'm really unsure on how to improve right now. The jump between 1/2 and 3/4 English feels massive at the moment. I've got a SAC this Friday and we get the topics on Wednesday, what can I do to make my essays deeper and just generally better quality?
Thank you!
I'm doing Frankenstein as well for English and my teacher often critiques our class for a lack of depth. You can't just scrape the surface of an idea and cobble it into a paragraph any more, even though that worked in year 11. With Frankenstein being such a complex novel, you have to find depth in your analysis and discuss more than just the themes of the text. Social and cultural values, intertextual references and motifs/imagery are all important parts of the text to analyse when searching for the authorial intention behind a certain scene. Also try to approach the novel with a cultural interpretation in mind. A feminist interpretation works perfectly on Frankenstein as Shelley is a woman herself and many aspects of the novel are a layered critique of patriarchal society. You could even do a Marxist interpretation, although you'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel to find supporting evidence. All in all, I'd recommend you read university analyses of Frankenstein to add depth to your essays as PhD students will have made links and discussed ideas that you or your teacher would have never thought of in a million years.
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I'm doing Frankenstein as well for English and my teacher often critiques our class for a lack of depth. You can't just scrape the surface of an idea and cobble it into a paragraph any more, even though that worked in year 11. With Frankenstein being such a complex novel, you have to find depth in your analysis and discuss more than just the themes of the text. Social and cultural values, intertextual references and motifs/imagery are all important parts of the text to analyse when searching for the authorial intention behind a certain scene. Also try to approach the novel with a cultural interpretation in mind. A feminist interpretation works perfectly on Frankenstein as Shelley is a woman herself and many aspects of the novel are a layered critique of patriarchal society. You could even do a Marxist interpretation, although you'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel to find supporting evidence. All in all, I'd recommend you read university analyses of Frankenstein to add depth to your essays as PhD students will have made links and discussed ideas that you or your teacher would have never thought of in a million years.
Thank you so much for your advice, it helped out heaps!