Hi Guys,
It's about 6 weeks until D-Day and I'm sure you can't wait to have me out of your lives. On that note, I've spoken to a selection of VCE English teachers from a cross section of schools over the break and there has been a number of developments regarding the approach students should take when formulating their response to Task 2: Context on the exam. The information below is especially relevant to those students who wish to write expository for that particular section.
As we're all aware, the final exam comes in three flavours: text response, context writing and language analysis. Task 1: Text Response is generally formulaic. It involves your stock standard 1-3-1 introduction, body and conclusion. Students make their case in their introduction, provide evidence and supporting arguments in the body and then a closing statement to wrap things up. The more creative pieces may try to take on a contrarian perspective and challenge the status quo but generally the writer's creative options, in particular their style and form, are limited to the rigmarole of text response writing as outlined in the study guide.
Task 3: Language Analysis is even more formulaic. Students are provided with a fictitious piece of stimulus to which they must pick apart and analyse the various elements of suasion. There's generally a regime in place where students are taught to identify and comment on the effectiveness of structural and emotive mechanisms that help the piece and its author connect with the target demographic. The stimulus is generic and contrived as its purpose is to provide enough talk points for students to pick up and expound.
The crux of the exam lies with Task 2: Context. Let's first discuss the merits of an Expository Essay. This is a piece that takes an opportunity to discuss and dissect the essence of a particular text with corroborative evidence from external references. The split between internal vs external evidence gathering is around 30:70 give or take. Students may wish to adopt the golden triangle approach (text-author-audience) whereby they formulate a piece that draws upon the dominant themes, symbols and motifs present within the text and its genre with respect to the author and target audience. The Expository Essay is structurally similar to that of a Text Response but the content is augmented with exogenous references to provide additional insight and broaden the reader's worldview. it is, for the most part, formulaic and procedural.
Conversely, an Expository Article is a persuasive piece that also draws heavily on imaginative and creative resources. The form is flexible: a letter to a Special Interest Group, correspondence between the author and a related party, an exchange of dialogue between characters from the text, a personal reflective journal etc. The choices are endless. The article format is flexible and highly responsive as it enables each student to customise and tailor their piece to their sentimentality and to address a particular section of subtext. Students are encouraged to extract a segment of the plot and take a tangential approach by proposing an alternative plausible reality whereby they create and introduce an extension to the pre-existing body of work. It is important to realise that the expository article can manifest into different things for different writers but it is not an essay in its own right.
The free form feature article or letter aspires to the spirit and essence of exposition. Expository writing was never about conformance. In an otherwise regimented exam, it presents students with a unique opportunity to deviate from the norm and address the prompt from a vantage point of their choice. The decisions students make with respect to language, narrative, tone, form and delivery help shape the nature of the beast and the impact it has on the reader. Hence, and most importantly, it arms students with the ability to surprise the assessor, perhaps even shocking them, and to challenge their priors. Expository writing using free form style such as feature article is a pioneering endeavour that is naturally innovative but also necessarily risky.
In general, the uncertainty in marking associated with Task 1 and 3 are low-moderate and low respectively on a risk matrix. For Task 2, it is moderate-high. As we're all aware, there's a positive correlation between subjectivity and marking uncertainty. It is entirely possible, and not altogether uncommon, for a perfect piece to be given an 8.0 or 8.5; perhaps even a 7.0 if the assessor is a real [REDACTED]. On average, each piece is allocated 4 minutes of assessment time; 2 minutes from each assessor. The average of their combined mark is the final mark you get (exceptions are rare).
As you can imagine, the margin for error in judgment and subjective interpretation is significant. If you write a mediocre piece and your message is unclear to the examiner, you will not get the mark. If you write a brilliant piece full of nuanced and eloquent ideas but the message is unclear to the examiner, you will not get the mark. And unlike your SACs which allow students to guide markers with a Statement of Intent, such a device is not available for consideration on the exam. So be clear, be concise and be succinct. Take the examiners for the rider of their lives; just don't expect them to pick themselves back up if they fall off your bandwagon.
