C13 Essay Brief and notes

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These essays are about showing us how you understand the relationship between the theory and the practice of media production within the Cultural and Media Studies degree. We start from the principle that your education here involves developing not only a critical understanding of media texts , institutions and audiences but that media production itself is an important critical tool. You can use media production to reflect on or explore theoretical ideas, to make media texts in new and critical ways. By critical we mean that you should not necessarily be trying to reproduce mainstream media representations of any given topic but that you should take a lead from your reading in this and other modules in order to think about how your media production might offer different or challenging versions of the world we share. This essay is your chance to show us how you understand this process.

It follows that we are not looking simply for an account of what you did or of what is in the final piece. We have a pretty good idea of what you did and we have also seen the finished work - so you don't need to describe that in any detail. You may however wish to analyse both the the processs and the product - this is different from describing them !

A Rough Guide to Essay Writing

Writing your essay for this assessment is essentially the same process that you use in writing any other essay. There are three crucial stages to go through before you can write with confidence.

1: Study the assignment. Underline key words and phrases. There will be a hinterland of ideas behind the question. You have to try to read the mind of the person who set the task - and he or she has much wider knowledge and experience than you do. Make sure you know, as well as you can, what you have to do.

2: Gather ideas. To try to access the crucial ideas, brainstorm the question. Make a list, no matter how confused or disordered, of all the ideas and questions that come to your mind. One idea will lead to another. You will have to do plenty of reading (often skimming and scanning rather than slow study) to develop these ideas. Eventually you will have pages of notes, until something magical will occur: you will begin to see connections, things will begin to drop into place, you will be able to group your ideas into categories and see the relations between them. And you will be able to frame the overall statement that your essay will "prove" and illustrate.

3: Write the opening paragraph. The first paragraph will probably not be more than ten or a dozen lines. It will start generally but by the end it will have made a statement - the thesis statement that will hold your essay together. This statement is like a sign-post to the reader. It tells your reader where the essay will be going. It doesn't make the journey, but points the reader in the right direction.

A Rough Guide to Assignment 2

Stage 1: Study the assignment
THE BRIEF
- Evaluative essay 2000 words to address the following questions :-
- How has your understanding of the theoretical context developed through the production process ?
- What further design references have you drawn upon ?
- What have you have learnt about the media of photography, video and web sites from your production process ?
- How have you used or developed existing codes and conventions.
- How has your understanding of the work been developed or challenged by an audience ?

It is clear that this assignment is asking you to know several different things, and to demonstrate this knowledge. (What are these things?) It is also asking you to show the relationship between this knowledge and the methods you have used in your production. What can you tell from this about what the assessor will be looking for?

Stage 2: Brainstorm ideas

This is where you must do plenty of reading - reading the texts you have been given, and others that you have discovered, perhaps from references given in your set texts.

To focus on the first required element - to be sure what ideas and theories you are supposed to know - you will have to scour your texts. As you read, look for connections. What ideas and theories tend to recur? What links can you find between the texts? Do the set texts suggest other kinds or reading or referencing that you could follow up ? Have you been able to confirm or to challenge theoretical ideas through your practical production ?

For the second element, you will have to think back over the examples of work we have looked at: Jo Spence, Nan Goldin, VideoNation, Girls Girls Girls, etc. There will also be references in your texts that will be relevant. We also expect that you will have looked at other work as part of your design research process so we will be looking for evidence of that too. If you have been exploratory, you will have other personal examples of work to cite. Of course the assessor will appreciate that! You will also have to make notes on the relations between these examples and your own work (to deal with the second part of this element).

The third element asks you to tell us what you have learnt about the various media you have used over the year. This is obviously very open ended - ideally we are looking for a summary of what you knew before and what you now feel as though you know, so that you can assess your own learning curve.

The fourth element is an account of the visual codes and cultural conventions you have tried to deploy or to challenge. Note the last two terms. You will definitely have been deploying visual codes and cultural conventions - I am doing this as I type this - and you may also have decided to C
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ENGE them in some way. If you are developing your understanding of the ideas of media and cultural studies - for which you can gain many insights from your texts - you will be able to deal with this fully.
Finally, there is the matter of audience. This may seem easy, and in a sense it is, but if you know about audience studies you will be aware that it is not actually so easy to evaluate people's response to media. So here too your essay may demonstrate some originality and necessary complexity.
Stage 3: Opening Paragraph
You will have reached this stage if you now feel that you can see the wood for the trees - that there are one or two overarching ideas you can develop throughout your essay. You may find yourself rewriting the assignment brief (above) but with a better sense of what it means. Remember to make clear to the reader what you are going to do, but try to do this in a more interesting way than "In this essay I am going to ...". You will probably begin the paragraph with some introductory, general wording, but by the close you will have made clear the areas of interest that you will be discussing. Good luck!

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