OU blog

Personal Blogs

Christopher Douce

A230 Journal - April 2023

Visible to anyone in the world

1 April 2023

A serious post for April Fool’s Day!

I’m going through the block materials about Sam Selvon, and I’m quite enjoying it. I think I might go this direction in the EMA, but I have to read Lonely Londoner’s again.

2 April 2023

Just finishing up reading the chapter about Selvon, and then I move onto the chapter about Elizabeth Bishop, which is proving to be slow going. I find the readings and work through a couple of them, and find them to be quite difficult. As a bit of side reading, I have a quick read of a summary of Bishop’s biography.

10 April 2023

I’m pulling together a set of notes before pulling everything together for the EMA. Today I’ve been focussing on one of the set texts: The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. Despite its obvious issues, I’m starting to really like this book.

11 April 2023

I’m moved on from Selvon and onto one of Joyce’s short stories. I read it again, underline some passages, read a review of the story, and then transcribe some quotes into my notes document. My next task is to make some notes from the module materials.

15 April 2023

I get a couple of hours to work through all my notes whilst on a short break. I move different notes into group of categories, set up a few subheadings, and a structure emerges: introduction, text 1, text 2, compare and contrast, conclusions. I manage to work on the introduction and the beginning to the text 1 section.

19 April 2023

I find a bit of time in my day job to do some writing. I cut a few notes and quotes that I feel I don’t need, and work on text that flows between the different sections.

20 April 2023

Another couple of hours for writing. I return to reading one of the texts, identify a couple of elements, and comment on these within the EMA document, and then completely change the conclusion, editing up a new version. It’s time to cut out all the temporary headings, see what my current word count is (I think I’m roughly on target), and get a printout ready for editing. I think I’m two days away from submission. Even if I need to make some further changes, I can go ahead and submit revisions before the cut-off date.

When I take out my structural headings and exclude my references, Word tells me that I’m slightly below the word count. I do some editing on my printed document using a pack of coloured pens: one colour that is an edit, and another colour that confirm that the edit has been actioned in the submission. After the edits, I’m a touch over, but only by a tiny amount.

I submit my EMA, ridiculously early.

Being a swot, I still hope to attend the EMA prep session that my tutor runs, just to make sure that I haven’t completely got the wrong end of any sticks.

Permalink
Share post