In all categories - "Excellent" which equates to 70+ or a first!
3 years out of academia - and I still got it!
Probably helped that I've got a BIG sticker on the front that says:
"This student has a specific learning disorder. Please mark for content and understanding and not for structure or use of standard English"
He says in the commentary at the back that although the essay contained some correctable errors these were few and that this is an essay I should be proud of.
So despite feeling pretty crappy with a cold (damn germ-infested kids!) I'm feeling really rather groovy.
My grammar was criticised for my MA dissertation - hence why I made sure I identified myself to student services and got assessed for dyspraxia before starting uni again.
I have just joined to the forum therefore it is too late to say but I couldn't pass without saying CONGRULATIONS Well done to you!
I started an access course and I need to write essays which I have never been able to. Could I possibly ask you that how did you overcome it? How did you learn to make a plan, draft....
Pearl
Lithium_joe wrote:In all categories - "Excellent" which equates to 70+ or a first!
3 years out of academia - and I still got it!
Probably helped that I've got a BIG sticker on the front that says:
"This student has a specific learning disorder. Please mark for content and understanding and not for structure or use of standard English"
He says in the commentary at the back that although the essay contained some correctable errors these were few and that this is an essay I should be proud of.
So despite feeling pretty crappy with a cold (damn germ-infested kids!) I'm feeling really rather groovy.
I was given some software called 'Inspiration' which works like an interactive diagram and mind map that helps to structure essays. You might enquire after that as it may help you.
Personally, and this is kind of funny, I found it a bit too constricting because my 'mind maps' are hierarchical and web-like - not symmetrical and branching. So when I tried to use the software to plan out the essay I had in mind the diagram was lop-sided with lots of arrows pointing hither and thither; linking the abstract and tangental points of my reasoning to say A links to B links to C.
It was a case of well the map makes sense to me, but I was contorting it to fit my model of thinking rather than using it to model my thinking around.
Anyway you may enjoy more success with it and my opinion of it is that it is a really good programme but wasn't for me.
As for essays in general - the best are not 'journeys of discovery' in the sense that you set out blind and see where you end up; they should have pre-determined goal, whether that is a reading of a novel or a presentation of some scientific reasoning or a discussion of a political principle. You should know what your outcome is going to be.
The task then is to guide your reader in the 'journey of discovery' toward the point you want to make.
The structure (and this is where something like Inspiration may help you) is that each paragraph should be a wholly formed point in their own right such that a reader can take a paragraph and understand your reason for writing that alone.
It may be the paragraph that introduces the problem: so and so wrote a book and what it means has been contested ever since; we set out to find out what the result would be if we extended the time in the experiment; Marx set down his dialectical materialism in the philosophical tradition of Hegel and against a political backdrop of capitalism at it's height when religion dominated the political landscape.
It may be the paragraph where you distinguish your analysis from someone else's: Person X said the gothic amounted to terror; Person Y disagreed with that and argued for the gothic in the romantic tradition, and while they were right to focus on the gothic as the central genre of the book , neither address the real question of the main characters femininity in the gothic genre - which has a long a history going back to....
or it may form your conclusion: wherein you state for the reader what you already had determined for yourself.And the very best essays always form something of a circle, in that they return the the problem laid out at the beginning and restate it for the benefit of the reader, a bit like recounting the details of the crime in murder she wrote, before the killer is revealed.
The basic rules for essay writing as for presentations are:
Tell 'em what you are going to tell 'em.
Tell 'em.
Then tell 'em what you told 'em.
"You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know."
~ Sam Harris.
And if all else fails, use lots of quotes!!! I do this alot, it seems to work! I pretty much just link together scholarly quotes on the subject to form an argument/answer the question. It's working well for me so far... x
"Just keep swimming, Just keep swimming..."- Good advice from Dory
Congratulations this proves that when dyspraxics concentrate on the things we are good at, this raises our self esteem. We're all capable highly intelligent determined indivduals!!
Congrats. I went to see The Kings Speech last night. You would all enjoy it even though it is a stammer he had troulbe with but you know the thing....looking for help, getting help and with the help succeeding.
