Personalities, Events & Situations (1 Viewer)

[Amleops]

I have an in class essay to do first day back on the Justice Game, and with the practice ones I am doing currently I’m having some issues with structure. With Module C being quite different in its focus, I have had to move away from the standard theme by theme essay which had served me well in the AOS and other modules.

The rubric mentions exploring representations of events, personalities and situations. Hence, for me it seems easy, in accordance with the rubric, to divide my essays into representations of personalities and representations of events/situations (as separate paragraphs of course). These tie in quite well, especially with this upcoming assessment task with the prescribed related text we have to use, which draws many parallels with The Justice Game. The thesis would be based on conflicting perspectives and the subsequent examples of representation would allow me to create adequate evidence to support my thesis in a range of contexts.

During some holiday revision lectures we have had at school, my Extension 1 teacher has expressed disdain for this method. He only mentioned this briefly, didn’t explain why, and didn’t offer any alternatives, but in my opinion I think I could write a good essay using the aforementioned structure. Normally I would have done it anyway, but this teacher is one of the best I’ve ever had, and he hasn’t steered me wrong in the past, so I’m a little sceptical.

So my question is would this be a suitable method? For example, if I started with personalities, I’d talk about the portrayal of Michael Argyle, Mary Whitehouse, Princess Diana etc, do the related text, and then move onto events/situations with the state of affairs in Venda, Jamaica or Singapore, and then the related text again, would that be sufficient? Or does it seem like I’m trying too hard to reflect the rubric in my response?

 

[aphorae]

I think your teacher may have expressed disdain as it is better to structure paragraphs around interlinked ideas, such as the influence of personal agenda upon conflicting perspectives and so on - basically the nature of conflicting perspectives. It shows more sophistication that simply saying conflicting perspectives exist in relation to events, personalities and situations.

For instance, it would be more sophisticated in belonging to have "A lack of acceptance and mutual relationships may hinder an individual's self-growth and the development of an identity" as your first main point, rather than simply saying "A sense of belonging can be found in the acceptance of others."

 

[Amleops]

OK, the question we ended up getting was quite specific, it was something along the lines of how do the composers of texts represent events, personalities and situations to express their personal agenda; plus they specified Trials of Oz, Michael X, the Afterword, and the related text. So yeah, pretty much the whole essay was based on that example of the idea you used.

I guess I got away with it here, seeing as we were actually required to acknowledge personalities/events/situation in the question. But it might be better to use interlinked ideas, as you have said, if the future questions will be more open-ended. I guess I was a bit skeptical of doing it to begin with since Module C essays talk about how things are represented, so it makes sense to divide the essay into the ways in which conflicting perspectives are represented, rather than the composer's wider purpose (I would mention it, of course, just not make it the central point of this essay as that is against the aims of the Module). But if the ideas you are talking about are as broad as something like personal agendas then that should be easy enough to integrate.

That being said, I didn't generalise by saying stuff like, "Conflicting perspectives exist in personalities, this is because.....", obviously that would be just stating a fact and not allowing for much explanation. My thesis was that the authors enforced their personal agenda by creating a dominant perspective, which I went on to explain through the representation of personalities and situations while still relating everything back to what the agendas actually were, and their overall purpose. I expanded the whole personalities/events/situations idea further to create my main points, like, "Through the unique portrayal of personalities, both composers are able to utilise language forms and features to establish a dominant perspective, in which their opposers are belittled and their supporters are advocated, which persuades the audience to conform to their personal agenda." (I'm paraphrasing here, I know it sounds a bit rough and long winded but that was the basic idea).

But I do get your point. Thanks