Audience Essay Feedback and Learner Response

WWW: WOW! This is an incredibly impressive essay – over 2,000 words! That is pushing towards A Level coursework-length, well done! This demonstrates why we need to aim for the very top grades (and beyond your target grade!) in Media. You’ve explored both sides of the argument in so much depth for all three industries and covered everything we’ve studied and more. What a brilliant way to end your first term in Media!

EBI: We always want to be making progress and there are definitely a few areas we can work on… one would be very minor but worth looking at. When structuring and presenting academic essays, try and avoid sub-headings (they are useful for planning but avoid them in the essay itself) and also make sure your text is left-aligned rather than centred. Once you’ve taken out the sub-headings, you need to use connectives and well-written topic sentences to weave the sections together. For example, when you move from the music industry to film/TV, you might write a topic sentence such as:

“Like the music industry, the film and television industries have been hugely disrupted by the internet.”

You may even want to play around with your structure so you look at the negatives first for film/TV (continuing the thread of the music industry) but then bring it back round to the positives.

Another aspect to your feedback is the importance of examples. Your BTS example for the music industry is brilliant but you really want a specific media example in every paragraph – e.g. a film franchise that demonstrates the lack of creativity in the industry, news stories that are worthless celebrity ‘clickbait’ etc. Actual examples will really strengthen your argument.

Your conclusion could be a bit sharper – it seems to add new ideas rather than sum up the arguments that have come before – see learner response suggestion below.

Finally, keep an eye on your written English (e.g. you have a few apostrophes that are incorrect in places.)

LR: See tasks on blog – but I would ignore task 5 (rewritten paragraph) and instead work on implementing the feedback above by taking out the subheadings, updating the topic sentences and adding examples where you can.

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What was the word count for your essay?

The word count for my essay was 2,356 words.

What was your strongest paragraph? Why do you think it was better than others?

I think that my strongest paragraph was my News Industry paragraph on changes of the internet. I think this because I was able to write quite a lengthy paragraph and was able to go into depth for each point. I believe it was better than the other paragraphs because I know a bit more about the News Industry as I have been informed about it from a young age.

What was your weakest paragraph? Why do you think it wasn't as good as others?

I think that my weakest paragraph was my conclusion. This is because I wasn't able to sum up everything I had said well enough into the paragraph and therefore it wasn't as good as I initially hoped it would be.