Billy is currently authoring a series on “The Study of English Literature”. Part 1 of the series, called “Finding a meaning”, can be found here. Part 2 of the series, titled “Positives and Negatives”, can be accessed on this page. If you were marking passage commentaries, which of the following would you think was the [...Read more...]
In our early days in IB English, we were encouraged to write practice essays in order to improve our own essay-writing skills. Our teacher gave us an excerpt from Jack and the Beanstalk, and we had to devise individual topics. I decided to choose the idea of Jack being rewarded as my central focus. As [...Read more...]
Note: the comments here are written with passage commentaries (or oral commentaries, which are the same thing) in mind, but they could be applied to some degree to most other forms of writing done in English class. Click here for Part One of The Study of English Literature series. You can access the next section [...Read more...]
Common Meanings What possible meanings might one find in a work? One method is just to take the specific events of a story and restate them in very broad terms. For example, if the story is about someone who is beaten up by bullies, then the meaning is never just that we should do something [...Read more...]