Critical and Contextual Issues - Week 2

In today's lesson we discussed the difference between an essay and a dissertation as well as a breakdown of an essay. We also worked together to help with our own essay ideas.

The difference between an essay and a dissertation is that and essay is usually short (around 1500-2500 words). A dissertation is a subject you chose for yourself but so can an essay. It is also a discussion involving different points of view or sets of ideas, It not only examines a subject but will review different points of view about that subject.

An essay is a short piece of writing that discusses, describes or analyses a topic. There are many types including:

• Expository - Explaining something to the reader using facts and not your own opinion.
• Compare and Contrast - Unbiased discussion. Compare essays focus on the similarities between the subjects and contrast essays look at the differences. 
• Cause and Effect - Explains how or why an event happened. Cause looks at why something happened, whereas effect essays look at what happened after because of the event. 
• Argumentative - Try's to persuade the audience to the writers point of view by using evidence to back up their opinion.
• Research - Uses other peoples research along with your own ideas to compare their thought with the writer's.
• Literary - Explores the meaning and construction of the piece of work.

Compare and contrast, Cause and Effect, Argumentative and Research are the main ones we will be using in our essay's.

Classwork - 

We then got into groups and helped each other brainstorm each others essays so we could get a better idea of what we want to write about and start to collect all the ideas.

I knew already that I wanted to Look at the Female Roles in the industry and this activity helped to form a question and see what specifically i could write about.

Question;

How have women's roles in the Animation Industry changed over the years?  
 Ideas:

• Maybe look into one specific Company like: Disney or Dreamworks
• Past and Present
• People (Mary Blair)
• History and Social norms of the time

Structures:

Guide:

1. Introduction - 200 words
2. Chapter 1 - 500 words
3. Chapter 2 - 500 words
4. Chapter 3 - 500 words
5. Summary - 300 words

Suggested Framework:

1.Introduction: Say what the essay discusses and the order in which it is structured.

2. Set the context, generate a background, and touch on issues. Review the background literature if it is relevant.

3. Make a specific comparison.

4. Construct an argument based on the evidence (main body of the essay).

5. Draw some conclusions and summarise if necessary and point out any important implications.

6. Add references, bibliography and an appendix. 

We next looked at transitional words and phrases to help us link sentences and paragraphs together. These

include:

However

Although

Thus

Therefore

furthermore

On the one hand………On the other hand 

It can be seen from this that firstly……

  Secondly…… Thirdly……… Finally

Two further points need to be considered:

  firstly…….. Secondly

 In addition .....

For instance ……

Homework:

To research the paintings 'The Music Lesson' by Johannes Vermeer and 'Guernica' by Pablo Picasso and

compare the two.