English – HL Essay Reflection 1 and 2

Reflection 1 :

Woman’s World being a text that focuses on identity issues, stereotyping and the difficulties people who do not fit into the ‘norms’ related well to the global issues that we studied in how to approach our paper 1 practice essay. Gender identity as a global issue interests me in particular how Female Identity is explored through Rawle’s unique methodology in Woman’s World. Through writing the paper 1 practice essay, I learnt about the way I need to structure my essay and what areas I need improving on. The planning of my essay and the ability to  go into deeper analysis was helped by my paper 1 work. Initially, my planning was not in depth and I looked at surface level issues  but after looking back at my paper 1 and receiving feedback, I have understood the importance of going in depth into the topic and how to analyse effectively. In particular I was able to clearly state the content, context and big ideas, themes and concepts. This would be important to push my essay to the next grade level. Another aspect was focussing on sub topics to show that I have a greater understanding of the text and the global issue that I am looking into. The feedback from my paper 1 essay and two follow up questions was important. The first question was ‘how might you embed evidence and unpack these more effectively’ and the second question was  ‘how might you organise your ideas better to provide deeper discussion with relevant insights?’. Through this feedback, I understood that for my HL essay I needed to further embed evidence and use the PEA analysis in order to effectively unpack my essay’s theme’s, embed my evidence and would also help me with unpacking the techniques. The second question focused on organising my ideas better in order to provide a deeper discussion. I feel that my paper 1 essay did lack that element but I have learnt that structure plays an important role throughout the essay. Organising my ideas would mean that I would be able to explore a broader range while keeping the analysis in depth. My next steps would be to use that feedback that I have received from my paper 1 essay, as well as incorporate ideas from the discussions that we have had in class.

Reflection 2 : 

As I continue to write my essay, I gain a better understanding of the novel and specific details within the novel. I have made significant progress with writing the essay since the last reflection. The approach had to change at certain points as my analysis became deeper but on the other hand I had to limit some of the areas that I wanted to explore, like the relationships Roy and Norma had with other people, as this would mean that I could not go into in-depth analysis. I also became clearer about the images that I wanted to include and how to incorporate them (i.e the scissors image and the train image). In regards to my outline, there have been some changes along the way in that my initial structure was too ambitious and I have had to change the outline so that the areas that I wanted to explore would have more detailed analysis. So, I created more focused thesis strands and followed the PEA structure.

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