Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions )and is used under a Creative Commons licence. All other materials included in this unit are derived from content originated at the Open University. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources
12 Further reading and sources of help Your tutor is the first person you should contact if you are encountering difficulties with any aspect of your studies. If there are any issues raised in this unit that you would like to discuss, you should approach your tutor. Sharing your action plan with him or her would be a useful first stage. Your chosen place of study may offer a programme of learning skills sessions that should reinforce some of the issues raised here. Further reading
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10 Reflecting on tutor feedback When you have taken the assignment as far as you can, you will benefit more from the feedback from your tutor than you will from further polishing. If you have worked hard to become involved with your subject you will really appreciate having a captive audience. Someone with as much interest in the subject (and presumably greater knowledge) as you, will take time to read what you have written and to understand what you are trying to say.
8.1.1 Achieving a good polish Here is a list of indicators you can use to judge your polishing techniques. Most guidance notes given to students include these points, but they are not always followed. 7.4.2 The introduction of an essay What is the introduction of an essay and what is its purpose? Write down your own understanding of the term ‘introduction’ in relation to essays. 6.3.2 Stage 2 Create a mind map Now you need to think about grouping the ideas, creating a flow for your assignment. We started by grouping together our ideas and material for the essay on the possible advantages of being a mature student. This helped us to create a mind-map by seeing where links could be made and so made it much easier to decide where the weight of evidence was taking our argument (Author(s): 6.1.2 Essay planning Carefully read the following short essay. Try to identify its strengths and weaknesses in terms of planning. Take your time, but don't think you need to be familiar with the content, you are trying to find what provides the writing's framework. Then try to answer the questions that follow in Activity 13. 6.1 Why plan a piece of writing? Planning is about creating a framework that will help you to make choices about what needs to be included in your assignment and what doesn't. Some people feel they don't need to plan: starting to write helps them know what it is they are going to say. If you recognise yourself here, we suggest you consider the points we raise in this section. 5.4 Identifying sources So what material do you have available to you? Your materials are likely to be your first sources of information. Any guidance notes you may have been given will sometimes tell you exactly which sections you need to look at. But don't forget that your course materials encompass more than just these texts. Make use of any handouts you've been given. Your own notes of what you have been reading or watch 5.2.2 Opening up ideas: analysing the question What do you need to know about your assignment? Most importantly, what it's about (i.e. the topic). Once you have worked this out, you are in a better position to gauge how much you already know and how much you will need to find out. 4.3 Essays Now let's turn to essays. Note down what you consider to be the purpose of an essay. Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, 2.2 Developing writing styles If any of the statements on the previous page rings true, let us reassure you: many other students are feeling the same as you. Writing skills can be learned. We want to emphasise straightaway that this is a process that can be continually developed. There is no single ‘correct’ way of writing: different academic disciplines demand different styles. This can be confusing if you feel that you've mastered what is required for one course, only to find that something different is Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand what writing an assignment involves; identify their strength and weaknesses; consider the functions of essays and reports; develop writing skills, whatever the stage they have reached. Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: 8.6 Research skills This kind of work teaches some very valuable skills: how to set about an enquiry how and where to find source material and information how to make your own investigations strategic planning time management cutting corners and being pragmatic analysing and interpreting primary and secondary source material forming your own conclusions< 8.4 Carrying out research During this stage you get down to the business of analysing and interpreting the meanings of all your primary and secondary source material (documents, reports, newspaper accounts, books and articles), in the ways outlined in the previous sections of this unit. As you do so you will be making notes towards your project report. In this connection, it is very important to write down full references for all the material you use as you read each item. Then you can easily find partic 6.2.3 Precise reference to ‘linear’ texts You may find it more difficult to provide evidence from texts in which sounds, words or images follow on from one another over time (such as music and videos, plays and novels). Music is perhaps particularly hard to pin down. Sounds weave in and out of each other so that at first you may experience the music as seamless. But there are different ‘movements’ or ‘passages’ in music; moments at which a ‘melody’ is first introduced and later passages when it is repeated, for example. Y 5.3 A ‘circle’ of understanding It may seem as if analysing, interpreting and evaluating a text are ‘stages’ we go through, one after the other. But it's nothing like as mechanical as that. You do not analyse a text into separate parts, then ‘add up’ those parts to produce some interpretation of the whole, and then evaluate it. Rather, analysis–interpretation–evaluation are overlapping processes. They are different kinds of activity, as we have seen by looking at them separately. But when you try t 4.3 Analysis and interpretation We have got to the point of recognising that this is a lyric poem, and of thinking that it is probably about a lovers’ meeting. But you cannot reach firmer conclusions about a text's meanings until you have looked at as many aspects of it as you can. I think we need to go back again to the detail of the poem, because the analysis is not full enough yet. For one thing, there is something odd about the poem's syntax. If you look at the verbs in the first verse you'll see that they are a 4.1 Knowledge about context and author After you had read the poem a few times, you no doubt pieced together that the ‘I’ of line 5 in the first verse, the speaker, is rowing in a boat at night. We probably realise that with the word ‘prow’. By the end of the first verse the boat is beached in a cove. The journey continues over the beach and fields to a farm (by foot, presumably, since we hear about no other means of transport). There the traveller meets someone. It appears that they exchange signals – the tap on the pan
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It is word-processed or clearly and neatly hand-written.
The assignment is written on paper t
Activity 18
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There are advantages to stu
Activity 9
Activity 4
Discussion
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