Year+13+-+Essay+writing+feedback

Essay writing feedback
I have created this page so that I can give you generic feedback as a class. As I read and feedback on your essay individually, there are always things I find myself writing over and over. Rather than repeat myself on your essay, or rather than just give you the generic feedback verbally in class, I intend to give it to you in writing here.

This is a page you should refer to once you have your own essays back. Have a read and see if you can relate the feedback to the essays you write. As with all the resources available to you on this wiki, it will only benefit you if you take it in and actively use the information.

Keep writing those practice essays for me to mark.

__Shakespeare essays - July 2012 __
Any essay you write now in Year 13 should come back to theme. Everything you discuss, a particular extract, characters, events, are all significant because they contribute to an overall theme. You can not get away from this. So when you first sight the questions you need to be asking yourself what the big picture is and how you are going to discuss its development.
 * Theme/central issues/key ideas - **

Many of you are driving your essay development by discussing events and, some of you are merely pushing your essays forward by moving through the events that happen in chronological order. The danger with this is that this can easily turn into a big long plot retelling.
 * Driving of ideas - **

I am a little concerned that the brainstorming we did in class, beginning with a theme/key idea/central issue and then chronologically trying to analyse when it was introduced and developed etc, has led you to this. BUT, this is not what we did. We used the theme to drive our analysis. This is the key.

You must begin with the theme that you are discussing as central to the issue. From this point, figure out when it is presented etc.

One thing that happened over and over in the essays where you had chosen extracts as a starter was that you left the extract floating! You never 'seated' in the text. You never gave it a context, discussed where in the text it fits and why it is significant at this point. This was especially true of the extract "Hath not a Jew eyes..."
 * Extract based essays - **

If you use an extract to start your analysis, then when you look at it and read it for the first time try to position it. What has happened before and after and so why then has this extract been chosen. It will be important for one of the following reasons - 1. It'll pointed highlight something in a character - a motivation, personality trait, challenge... 2. It'll be a turning point in the plot <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">3. It'll highlight an important issue in the text. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">It may be that it covers all these bases. You NEED to try to assess all these elements and cover them when you discuss the piece.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Even in extract based essays there is a need for you to discuss the text as a whole. Take from the extract a central issue and when you have done the extract justice in terms of it's analysis, then you need to discuss how any of the about are expressed throughout the rest of the text.
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Discussion of the text as a whole - **

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Year 13 <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Back to the Beginning