Target: To make sure I organise my points during the planning stage of the essay and make sure I prioritise the most important, evaluative, interesting and difficult aspects of the text because they will allow me to access the top grades as long as I am tentative in the discussion of these points.
Task: To set myself a general question on language & power and apply it to a text that will allow me to meet my target and practice the essay. I will spend longer on the plan of this essay and make sure I can pick up on the most interesting, evaluative and ambiguous aspects of the text. Also, I will spend longer at looking at the purpose of the text and having an overview of the text so I can really concerntrate on the text and the question and that I answer it.
My target was to make sure that I can organise and prioritise the key points of the text in the exam. The task I set for myself was to look at a text and focus more on the interesting and ambiguous points and be able to link it to purpose, audience and format. I decided to use to look at the exam question that I did for the half-term assessment and construct a PEE paragraph on an aspect of the text that I hadn’t picked up on before - the ending. I decided to do this because I thought it was a part of the text that was interesting and quite an ambiguous point to talk about.
ReplyDelete“Although Text I could be read as full speech because the headteacher nicely rounds off with “... and more”, however the text could be read as being an extract. The explanation could be as simple as the text did not end with a full stop - although real speech doesn’t necessarily end with a full stop as it is usually a characteristic of represented speech and this text used “(.)” to indicate pauses and did not use a full stop anywhere else in the text - but the audience would not believe that the speech is over at this moment because no speech, especially a headteacher’s speech, would end in just “... and more” they usually would go on to thank the parents and children for coming and listening and that there may be refreshments at the back of the hall. Also, since the parents have already signed their children up to the school as the purpose of her speech is to persuade the parents to work with her because of school’s ethos and that the parents should be willing to make sure their children meet the standards of the “outstanding” school and also to make sure the students know what is expected of them and this may have been highlighted to them by the headteacher because she spoke to them during the day they visited. This means the headteacher may have ended the speech by telling the parents about where to buy the uniform and other things their children will need to start the year because uniform is a typical part of an “outstanding” school and by ending the speech in this way she is further informing the parents that they should make sure their children wear the uniform and do so correctly and this then highlights the primary purpose of the text.”
I think this was a very effective way of not only learning to look for ambiguous and interesting points to talk about but how to structure the point in a tentative way and still integrate points about the purpose, audience and form.
Lovely tentative exploration with links to the text. Possibly slightly too long for a section not directly linked to the close analysis of quotes, so try and pick the top couple of these ideas to give a flavour of your thinkng about the end of the 'extract' (we are not sure whether it is the beginning of the speech, the end or both that is edited out) and make them as concisely as possible, making sure to keep in references to "and more" and "outstanding". Perhaps redraft again to make it punchier? Brilliant idea for a task.
ReplyDeleteA*********** You made your paragraph tentative and interesting and you made your points well without being patronising or too one sided in your ideas
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