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Welcome, year 13, to the Unit 4 coursework blog. Here, you can ask questions, share strategies, and find direct links to the most useful web resources for Literature. It will also give you an update on homework tasks and any essays set.

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Thursday, 6 May 2010

Of Mice and Men essays

Ah.... essays. Most of you have problems with quotations and analysis. Lots and lots of good ideas, but you need to quote to back the ideas up (and not just storytell) and then push that anaysis further so that it becomes really interesting. Don't forget the assessment objectives! How we love them...
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4 comments:

  1. Eleanor8 May 2010 at 15:45

    Is it better to talk about just two ideas/characters/places etc but really analyse the quotations you use, or use lots of ideas and write less about each one? When I write my introductions, I always put lots of ideas in, otherwise I feel like the introduction is too short, but then I don't have time to write about all of them, or I do, but not very well...

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  2. Dr McCarthy8 May 2010 at 16:32

    I think it's still a good idea to mention lots of ideas in your introduction, but then investigate some of them in more detail than the others.

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  3. Eleanor8 May 2010 at 17:48

    So how much detail should you go into in your introduction? Should you just name the names of the characters you will be looking at:
    'Many of the characters are lonely, in particular George, Candy and Curley's wife'
    or should you put in more detail:
    'Many of the characters are lonely, but all in different ways - Curley's wife is married to a man she doesn't love, Candy is crippled and relies on an old dog for company, and George must keep moving, giving up jobs to look after Lennie, and never making other friends' ?
    I sometimes feel that if I put all my ideas into the introduction, I won't have anything new to say in the rest of my essay, and will just repeat myself. But is that alright, if the ideas are the same, but you add quotes to back your ideas up and analyse them?
    Also, can you change quotes to fit them into your sentence, as sometimes they don't make sense, if you want to embed them, but the verb isn't conjugated right, as you're saying, 'he does this' but the book says 'I do this'. Do you just split the quote up around the verb, or put it in brackets or something like that?
    Thank you! And sorry for such a long post!

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  4. Dr McCarthy9 May 2010 at 09:50

    I'm going to start a post about this, as it's important...

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