WRITING with Peter Thomas - "Locate yourself within your text"

 On Wednesday evening after a long day at work I sat myself down at my Laptop at 9pm to start our online discussion group. Needless to say I was feeling tired, and truthfully not 100% motivated...but what a great hour it turned out to be!

I have made a summary of the main points that stood out to me in our hour session, mainly to do with the structure of your essay.

We first started talking about:

 Academic writing VS Analytical writing

Firstly looking at academic writing: so you need to first establish, what are the conventions used in academic writing?

Below you will find a diagram explaining how one can structure an academic essay. Hopefully it is clear enough...(it wasn't til later that I was savvy enough to take a photo of the screen - silly me!)

I found this really helpful and wish I'd used this in Module 1 to give me a base to my structure. Especially when working under a relatively strict word count and you need to be selective; the condensed version of having your themes divided up but using more limited examples is a great tip to ensure you have good quality content and variety but also keeping your structure well organized. 

For some of you maybe this version is easier to process from Peter. Exactly the same, just not hand drawn by me!

Analytical writing:-

I suppose the biggest distinction in analytical writing is actively looking at the components, disecting them and asking interesting questions...

We can use the same structure that we established above in terms of organizing your themes and braking them down into sections. But in analytical writing we will be using our research; examples and case studies. Analysis is a systematical way of breaking down a case study using three different themed questions.

For example:

Basically find the themes for each case study and compare those themes. Make questions out of the themes and see what you notice!

We also talked a little bit about content, especially in reference to your own thoughts in your writing.

I know I was victim to this feeling in Module 1; being afraid to give too much of my own opinion as I assumed my perception was perhaps not as interesting or academically sound. Peter also spoke of his one fears when it comes to this and made me realize that

• it's ok to talk about yourself
• locate yourself within your text - I took this to mean that you should be open to and it is encouraged for us to share our own thoughts and where we stand on a subject
• you should be taken as seriously as any other academic people you may be referencing 
• your voice is worth hearing and you definitely should be present in your writing

I found that really useful, and I will bear that in mind for my Module 2 essays. 

We were given the exercise to briefly read a particular chapter in a book and undertake our own brief ananlyis. Here is what I found whilst reading an exert from "Welsh dresser" (the actual content is irrelevant now ). I initially found it quite hard to read, and a formal way of describing a fairly normal and benile task. But then with further inspection I surmised that it was a description of WHAT it actually was, and then a more PERSONALl thought about it - how this person felt about it and what it reminded them of, and then finally how it was placed in history - factual and including people of note.

So all in all it was covering all bases of analyzing this particular object. The exercise in itself was challenging us to analyze and place what different styles and methods were used in the description.

Tust opened my eyes to actually analyzing a piece of text.

Another good tip while researching is to follow a paper trail. If you find a particular author or reference from someone interesting, find further literature from them and follow that. 

For anyone reading, thanks for taking the time and I hope it's a little bit helpful!