Above is the highlighted tutor feedback from assignment 2 (received on 16th November) and as with the feedback from A1 it was comprehensive and extremely insightful.
Andrew has pointed out that while there are some good ideas within my essay, it is littered with typos and grammatical errors from the first sentence; that it is unstructured and disorganised; and referenced; and lacking in enough analysis.
Andrew as also point out that I should not have struggled along alone when I was unsure of how to approach this essay, instead of blindly handing in substandard work we could have exchanged an email or 2 to help guide me in the right direction. Andrew was also kind enough to include a marked-up version showing me where the errors were and give a few pointers to think about in would need to be a substantial re-work.
Below is an exchange of emails with Andrew about the feedback:
On 17 November 2016 at 14:48, Pete Walker <peter514508@oca.ac.uk> wrote:
Andrew
Thank you for the email and first let me say OMG some of there errors are glaringly bad – I know my proof reading can be bad but that is just embarrassing. I use grammarly as a spell & grammar checker It is usually very reliable however, I did have some internet issues with it on the day of submission which might have compounded things. However It is fairly clear that my approach to essay’s is way off the standard required for the course together with the fat that i need to reference with the body of text not just in a bibliography and the end (additionally do I need to reference the screen shots?). Any advice you can give around this would be great weather that is ti or places I can look for for support would be greatly appricated.
Your feedback is encouraging, I’m sorry I didn’t email over my concerns, it was mainly out of a sense of embarrassment as I was almost going to be saying I don’t know what to do. Knowing that my idea and observations are good is a major step forward in building my confidence, with the first essay on the 7 Samurai etc I had a much bettering feeling that I was heading in the right direction. However, as I did with the A1 i found myself writing a lot from within as I was struggling to find the literature about the films I had chosen.
Taking brief encounter I read the comments about the Noel Coward reflecting his own sexuality in the script in book by David Thompson which I have referenced in the Bibliography however, I did not find any further literature on this – would be appropriate for me to expand with why I agree with the statement? Similar with the side story in brief encounter of flirtation guard and mangeress – could not find literature on this.
I also found the word limit challenging, as you say I have spent too much time describing and not enough on analysis, however i dad find myself rapidly running out of words without being able to say much – did try including some screen shots but I think I haven’t used the correctly? you haven’t mentioned the in feedback were they a help or another hindrance to clarity.
Would a general idea for he rework be:
Brief introduction (100 words)
introduction of hays code and comment (250 word)
Comments on Brief Encounter (250 word)
Comments on Breathless (250 word)
Comments on Breakfast at tiffanies (250 word)
conclusion/wrap up (100 word)
Are there particular point that you recommend I follow-up on or areas i should “dump” completely. Another thing I find myself doing is writing solely about the plot / story often neglecting the technical aspects of the film; is this something I should address in rework and further assignments?
Many thanks again for going the extra mile with this feedback it is very much appreciated and I am encouraged again my rework and the assignments to come.
I think video feed back would be good going forward however, would a brief chat be ok before moving on?
On 17 November 2016 at 17:02, Andrew Conroy <andrewconroy@oca.ac.uk> wrote:
Pete,
That’s ok. Proofreading should be about much more than just checking for spelling errors and typos, and needs to be more focused on structure, coherence, logic, clarity. I’d recommend spending much more time on it with future assignments, possibly to the point of producing a couple of drafts before sending any over to me. n.b., I’ve copied in Eddie and Lia, two of my esteemed OCA colleagues, who I’m hoping will be able to offer further guidance with some of the questions you’ve raised.
Beyond this, what your email seems to suggest is that you’re taking a rather limited approach to how you search for and use literature, and I get the feeling that you may be putting the cart before the horse. To write about a particular film doesn’t necessarily have to entail finding a piece of literature that’s specifically about it. The censorship article in the book I mentioned doesn’t necessarily touch on the films you mention, but this doesn’t mean that you couldn’t apply aspects of what it says to them. Likewise, while shedloads has been written about Brief Encounter, you wouldn’t necessarily need to look for anything specifically about the film in order to find useful stuff- literature on British cinema of the era and film and representations of sexuality are just a couple of things that you could research and incorporate in some way. What you need to do is find material that will help you understand film and its innumerable wider contexts, and then bring these into your discussions of the specific films you look at. If you do this, then your own ideas will be stronger and better informed, so you won’t just be casually expressing an opinion. For example, ‘In his article *****, David Thompson suggests that Brief Encounter was a parable about Noel Coward’s sexuality. At the time Coward wrote the film blah blah British social history blah blah and censorship was a major obstacle to filmmakers blah blah blah Hays Code blah blah blah. While it’s tempting to read the film in this way blah blah blah other have suggested that blah blah blah. The use of parable, metaphor and allegory in film is a device that has often been utilised blah blah blah and many films, such as **** and ****, have been read as expressing certain ideas in this way blah blah blah’ (I hope that makes at least some sense, btw, but the point is that anyone can express an opinion. To make it stick with a piece of academic writing you need to carefully develop your argument with reference to other literature and ideas. Oh, and it wasn’t clear that the point you were making about parable and sexuality was Thompson’s, so you definitely need to look at your referencing, otherwise it brings in the thorny topic of plagiarism)
The structure you’re suggesting looks ok, but this really is up to you, not me. What I will say is that 250 words is not a lot to introduce and assess a film, but with word length you do always need to play the hand that you’ve been dealt. Perhaps consider starting from the opposite end and get together some notes on what you want to say about each film and then take it from there. Structure is important, of course, but it’s not necessarily always about saying that section A will fit into 250 words, B into 200, etc etc. Get the ideas and content right and the structure should follow in a fairly straightforward manner (or so the theory goes).
To be honest, I didn’t really pay too much attention to the screenshots. They can have their uses, of course, but they do need to be thought about carefully. And, yes, they do need to be referenced in a separate ‘list of figures’ and numbered, e.g., Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc..
Hope that all helps. Good luck, and I’ll see you on Skype post-A3.
This exchange of email was very helpful, as it not only helped to vocalise my insecurities around my work, but it also allows me to gain some insight into how to structure a proper academic essay. This my first real foray into higher education, anything else I have done at this level has been quite practical based, so extended writing is very new.
Research and reading are the key to success here as this allow we to work with ideas that are out there already and expand on the to produce a reasoned piece of work. I have the books I have to sit down and read them not just have them sit on my iPad. However, I need to reference my reading correctly; this not only evidences my research to my tutor and assessors but it also avoids that thorny issue of plagiarism – how my essay was structured and presented in Assignment 2 I could very easily have been accused of plagiarism when that was never my intention.
Following on from this I concentrated on reading through my books to expand on the ideas I had, ensure that I had the appropriate references to put together a much more coherent reworked reversion of the assignment,