English Comparitive

oncex

Hey guys, do ye write your essays and then learn them by heart since the same questions come up and you'll just have to incorporate the question?#

Also what comparitives are people doing?

yoho139

I learn the structure of the essay and general themes common to the texts then come up with the essay on the spot. May contribute to my lower grades (or maybe it's just because I don't enjoy English) but at least I won't be stuck if "my" essay doesn't come up, and I won't have to awkwardly shoehorn essays into the titles.

If by what comparatives you mean which texts, I'm doing Sive (good lord, John B. Keane is a boring man), How Many Miles To Babylon (characters do not understand how relationships work) and Purple Hibiscus (actually liked this one).

oncex

yoho139 wrote: »

I learn the structure of the essay and general themes common to the texts then come up with the essay on the spot. May contribute to my lower grades (or maybe it's just because I don't enjoy English) but at least I won't be stuck if "my" essay doesn't come up, and I won't have to awkwardly shoehorn essays into the titles.

If by what comparatives you mean which texts, I'm doing Sive (good lord, John B. Keane is a boring man), How Many Miles To Babylon (characters do not understand how relationships work) and Purple Hibiscus (actually liked this one).

Ya I did the same as you last year and got on fine in it (repeating), but just wondering if learning it word for word will help.
Ah sives not bad, i actually enjoyed it. What is your theme?

yoho139

oncex wrote: »

Ya I did the same as you last year and got on fine in it (repeating), but just wondering if learning it word for word will help.
Ah sives not bad, i actually enjoyed it. What is your theme?

Across the three, "Family as a nurturing or destructive force".

I felt like Keane got bored with the story halfway through, tried to force Sive to accept it without completely changing her character, failed and said "**** it, may as well just kill her and finish it here".

Comparative was always my strongest part of the course. How we approached it was taking our modes of comparison (Theme, CC etc) we made a list of sub headings. For example, our theme was "The Past" so sub headings included "The past in objects" "the past as a place." These sub headings represented one paragraph of the comparative essay. Then we made a table with our three texts and the headings down the side so we could easily compare them.
We came up with ~7 sub headings so that when it came to writing the essay, we could choose our best 4/5.

Our structure always went:
Intro
Sub heading 1 - 4 referencing all the texts and comparing etc
Conclusion

I've attached a 'Comparative Table' as it was really hard to describe and probable difficult to understand.

yoho139

That's exactly what we did.