Tag archives for study - Page 4
A215 On Reflective Commentaries
In finishing off TMA2 for the Open University A215 Creative Writing course I had a lightbulb moment. This was in response to some discussion on a student forum about how the marking didn't necessarily follow the quality of the submitted piece of writing. This was attributed to the subjectiveness of 'good' writing. Or rather, that it is hard to mark the qualitative aspects of stories, poetry etc on an absolute scale. Accepting that, and taking it from the university perspective. You need tutors to be consistent, and that leads to robust marking guidelines that are completely objective. This then avoids valid criticism and legal challenges that could be successful. Both of the last are a bad thing from an organisational perspective, especially a university. So what do you base these robustly objective marking guidelines on? The course materials. As a…
Creative Writing First Assignment Marked
Today I got my marks for my first assignment on the Open University course I am doing on Creative Writing (A215). I'm not allowed to post the question nor the feedback. However unusually this course has an exemption from publishing my own answer. Presumably this is because it is unlikely to help anyone else with the assignment were they to do it in the future. Creative Writing is quite different from the other academic courses that I have completed. For a start there is a limit to what you can get externally to answer the question. When I did strategy I was able to go and read loads of papers and books on the topic in addition to the course materials. For A215 the support of other people seems to take that place, along with copious redrafting. I went through…
A215 Short Fiction – Planting the Past
Art journal ideas1 - give away (Photo credit: ewian) This is a piece of short fiction written for the first online tutorial of A215 Creative Writing. It followed on from three exercises intended to spur some creativity. The exercises centred around thinking of a place that you love being and then asked questions about that place. The first was some descriptive writing about the place, things you could see, smell, hear etc. The second was to write about a flash memory in the present tense and the last was to list some facts about the place and then spin off some 'what ' questions related to those facts. This last one was what really got my 400 word piece of fiction going. So here it is, all 400 words of it. Planting the Past Hands resting on her heavily pregnant…
Mike Duff vs Macduff [Naming Crisis Point’s Main Character]
My mother, a recently retired teacher of High School English, has been reading my stories and asked me some interesting questions about why I named Mike Duff the main character in my first novella Crisis Point. She was interested in the parallels between Mike Duff and Shakespeare's Macduff. (more…)
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Next Steps
I've had a busy couple of weeks. First I had an Open University exam for the end of MST121 (Using Mathematics). The day after that I was presenting (and facilitating a couple of sessions) at our Directorate away day. The following day I spent 4 hours with the Government Digital Service, which was very interesting. GDS is a very interesting environment, it has a buzz about it that is very different from your normal central government department. I think it is something to do with the very high geek quotient present. In the space of two desks one guy was in a tweed suit with a (proper) bow tie and another was in t-shirt and shorts. There was also a lot of lego about. I actually quite liked the use of lego minifigures on their Agile tracker board. Each dev…