Wednesday, 10 May 2017

MS4 exam - how to structure your response

A proper structure helps you to organise both your writing and your thoughts. An organised and clear argument has a significant effect on the mark you receive in the exam.

Here's a quick and simple structure you can use. Thanks to Q block A2 media for the examples used in this guide!

Before you start writing


Before you even start writing your response, you need to choose your question, to underline the key terms of this question, and then to bullet point plan a response to the question. Plans are extremely important, as they allow you to structure in your head and on the page itself the ideas you will be exploring. You might want to jot down some theories you should be using. Here's an example of what a plan could look like:

To what extent are your chosen texts typical of their genre
Argument - genre essential tool for producer to target audience, but this is lazy and manipulative. 
Skyfall - spy/action/thriller... James Bond genre? Typical
Severin shot glass - typical representation of women. REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE
Opening Chase scene - typical action paradigms
Selfish - social realist - typical
A and S go scrapping - setting and narrative
A shouts at teacher - typical social realist theme COMPARE TO KES
Brave - Action adventure, family, Disney princess - atypical
Merrida archery scene - subverts representation of women/princesses
Mother bear scene - focusses on female relationships - GENRE FLUIDITY
CONCLUDE - genre is essential but used in limited ways that result in stereotypical representations, but Brave subverts expectations

This plan is a little rough... but it's going to be really useful to refer back to when the inevitable mid-question brain freeze happens!


Introduction


Definition - Define the keywords that you have underlined. For example "representation refers to how issues and individuals are constructed by the producers of media texts, and can be done so for a variety of different reasons"

Argument - the point of view that you will be taking in the essay. eg
"Media representations are constructed by producers to be as generic as possible, in order to appeal to the widest possible audience"
"Producers lazily reuse genre conventions to appeal to the largest possible audience"

Context - Basic information on the texts you are studying, eg "The Selfish Giant is a 2013 British social realist film directed by Clio Barnard which had limited financial success in cinemas"

Paragraph


Point - The thing that you wil be discussing in th eg:
"There are many powerful, though possibly negative representations of the working class used in The Selfish Giant, to present to the audience the depressing life of the working class in Bradford"
"The construction of the representation of women in Skyfall is consistently negative, which reinforces gender stereotypes"

Evidence - Comprised of visual codes and technical codes.
eg - "the deep red of Merrida's hair connotes her fiery and rebellious personality"
"Severin's low cut, tightly fitting dress further sexualises her when she is at her most vulnerable"

Argument - Link back to how your point confirms your argument. This is where you include theory.
"Severin's fetishistic dress confirms she is the subject of the male gaze. Her only function is to fulfil heterosexual male fantasies. This reinforces patriarchal hegemony as the dominant ideology of the text..."

Timings


There's no perfect timings, so this is just a suggestion. You should spend 50 minutes on each question. This could work out as:

Planning and introduction - 6 minutes

Text one - 13 1/2 minutes

Text two - 13 1/2 minutes

Text 3 - 13 1/2 minutes

Conclusion - 3 minutes


You can mess around with this formula, but remember to give yourself equal time to write about each text!