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English Extension 2 Research Help? (1 Viewer)

SophxMusic

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Hey guys, I know I recently posted about my major work but decided that this is a completely different question.
When researching for a short story, what is the best way to put it in your progress journal?
Obviously for information from websites/books etc. you would just quote or copy paste and then annotate or write about the relevance of it, but when it comes to reading books of the same form or genre, how do you record that?
Also, if you could tell me how you went about keeping a good record of your progress that would be great :)
 

Shadowdude

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Hey guys, I know I recently posted about my major work but decided that this is a completely different question.
When researching for a short story, what is the best way to put it in your progress journal?
Obviously for information from websites/books etc. you would just quote or copy paste and then annotate or write about the relevance of it, but when it comes to reading books of the same form or genre, how do you record that?
Also, if you could tell me how you went about keeping a good record of your progress that would be great :)
You blog about it, basically. In my journal I was like "I read _________, and I thought that _____________ was really cool so I decided to adapt it to my story in how I ____________"

And may I suggest a folder, those clip folders, for your 'journal'. That way, you can just hole punch and put in all your drafts, every print out and whatnot.

Also saying that you read the book and also saying how it formed your story will be crucial in making your Reflection Statement.
 

SophxMusic

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thanks, so do you recommend typing it or writing by hand?
I'll be printing everything off to put in a folder anyway.
 

LoveHateSchool

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I just wrote in it and glued anything I printed out into it. Into a large binder type journal thing with lined pages.
 

Amleops

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Obviously for information from websites/books etc. you would just quote or copy paste and then annotate or write about the relevance of it, but when it comes to reading books of the same form or genre, how do you record that?
I'm guessing here you mean for sources of fiction, as for non-fiction sources it would be pretty obvious to write notes or add notes to what you already have.

If you're reading a lot of the same type of sources then the key is to focus on the textual features in each text that have influenced you specifically. For example, if you did something like science fiction, and you wanted to explore the impact of technology on the human condition through say an authoritarian supercomputer, you may watch a film such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and record something in your journal about how Kubrick's characterisation of HAL (the computer) has made him appear more human than the humans, and thus you may consider that "personifying" the computer may help in your story to create the sense of computer evolving beyond what humans could ever become. Meanwhile you could take a similar construct in something like EM Forster's "The Machine Stops", and you could talk about how creating a religion around a computer is indicative of a regression of humanity, and therefore you could focus on how this is conveyed throughout the text to give you ideas on how to implement something similar in your story.

It's all well and good to do your typical generalised analysis of texts; how the text complies to the genre, techniques the author used etc, and you can still do that to a certain degree in the early stages of the course. But particularly in a genre study, after you've read so many books that are quite similar in terms of content, you really need to emphasise the differences, or what you found most appealing about the story that you want to use in your Major Work (unless of course if you were doing a critical response to the genre study, in which case the more repetitive the notion the more it proves a point you may be trying to make). For example, my major work was a kind of science-fiction satire story, so when I came down to reading something like "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", pretty much all of my analysis was on Adams' satirical writing style, rather than how the science fiction genre is conveyed through the story. I had analysed science fiction to death in the early stages of the course and even throughout Year 11, so doing a general analysis would have been rather counterproductive unless there were certain aspects of that text that were unique to the genre.

In terms of your other questions, how you present it is really up to you. As long as you show clearly your process of composition it doesn't matter if it's written or typed, do whatever you prefer. Think of your journal as something of a scrapbook, you collate all of your ideas, write some reflections on your progress, and if you do it often enough, your knowledge of the subject will become enhanced and the quality will come naturally. As the journal is not marked per se, the emphasis should be on the quality of the Major Work itself.

Hope that helps.
 

Shadowdude

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thanks, so do you recommend typing it or writing by hand?
I'll be printing everything off to put in a folder anyway.
I typed it up, that way it's easier to put in your folder.
 

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