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Written Assignment: Essay

Word limit: 2000 words (10% more or less is acceptable)

Essay Topic: This must not be the same as your tutorial presentation topic.

Requirements and Expectations

· Please read the Essay Marking Criteria before begin preparing your essay.

· You are expected to consult a good number of articles and book chapters, reflect upon their content, select the appropriate parts, synthesize, rewrite, and critique them. You are encouraged to rely on the required, recommended, tutorial and other readings of the unit. If you rely on one or two articles alone, even with proper citations, your essay will be a piece of plagiarism.

· Some online sources that are not academic could be useful for providing evidence, but they are not acceptable sources for citing arguments. Even when you use them to source evidences, you must be careful to select trustworthy sites. 

· It is important that you do not merely pile together evidence but try to use them for making a coherent argument. Similarly, an argument without adequate supporting evidences is null.

· If you borrow the ideas of someone else, you must cite the source. If you use the exact wording of a phrase, clause or sentence from someone else, you must directly quote by putting those words in quotation marks and citing the source. You should not directly quote an entire paragraph. Failure to cite properly is plagiarism. (Read the University policy.)

Essay Questions

1. What is unique about Ang Lee’s treatment of the romance between his two protagonists in The Wedding Banquet? Support your thesis by making appropriate contrasts with the treatment of romance in another film required or recommended as part of this unit of study.

2. What is unique about Wong Kar Wai’s handling of the sets in Chungking Express?

3. The little boy in the film Yi Yi (A One and a Two) takes photographs of the backs of people’s heads. Assuming that this is a metaphor, how do you interpret the film?

4. What is the place of nature in King of the Children?

5. Develop a thesis about one of the following themes in Farewell My Concubine – 1) loyalty and betrayal, 2) homosexuality, 3) reality and theatre, or 4) art, life and the state.

6. How does Jia Zhangke give the viewer a clear idea about what his protagonists are thinking in his film, Still Life?

7. Why is the female lead character in John Woo’s film, The Killer, so one-dimensional?

8. What is the significance of the physical environment of the church in John Woo’s film, The Killer?

Submission

1. Online submission

Electronic submission via Canvas will be required on the due date.

Essays and assignments not submitted on or before the due date are subject to penalty. Refer to http://sydney.edu.au/arts/current_students/late_work.shtml for the Policy on Late Work.

2. Guide to writing

Please make sure you familiarize yourself with the university’s guide to writing

<http://writesite.elearn.usyd.edu.au >, if you have not already done so. The site is particularly useful if you are not sure how to handle sources.

Tips

Some hints to help you earn one of the higher grades in your essay and tutorial presentation

1. Has the essay/presentation a good (that is, valid, significant and original) thesis?

What is a thesis? A thesis is the claim that an essay, presentation, article, or book sets out to substantiate through argument and evidence. You will probably find it most helpful to think of a thesis as an answer to a question. In writing your essay or preparing your tutorial presentation, you will often have to make up your own question to answer. It is not important, however, to mention the question. A thesis may start out as a hypothesis, which you then test through your reading or other research. Alternatively, you may formulate your thesis gradually in the course of your research. When you have done your research and decided on your thesis, you can start to plan your essay.

In a short essay or presentation, you should aim to include a statement of your thesis towards the end of your introductory paragraph or remarks. For further information about thesis statements, see (3) below.

2. Is there a well-developed argument, with cogent reasoning and use of evidence?

If you were ever asked at high school to ‘Write all you know about...’, those days are certainly gone now. Even ‘List all the evidence you can think of for...’ does not provide a truly satisfactory formula for a university-level essay. Your job is not to provide background information or summarize your area of interest. Rather, you are expected to develop an argument to convince the reader that your thesis, i.e. your answer to your question, is correct. Any good argument will have two essential features:

(1) reasoning—the argument should move on in a logical progression’ and

(2) evidence—of course, you are expected to provide evidence, woven into your argument, both for your thesis and for the major points and claims you make while demonstrating it.

3. Is the essay well structured, and is it always clear what the author is doing?

Is it clear what the thesis is? Does the essay give a good ‘sense of direction’? Is it clear what each stage of the argument is intended to achieve?

You should set up the agenda by incorporating a thesis statement into your introductory paragraph or opening remarks. A clearly-marked thesis statement might begin with the words ‘In this essay/presentation I shall demonstrate (or argue) that. . .’, or something similar. Use of such a statement helps not only your reader, but also yourself. Once you have a thesis statement, you know what you are trying to achieve, and can check that the argument and the conclusion do indeed match the thesis. (What if they don’t? Well, then you have to do some rethinking.)

Many students have problems with designing individual paragraphs. Bear in mind that each paragraph should have one central theme and do one central job. The opening sentence should announce the theme, state the proposition to be demonstrated in the paragraph, or otherwise let the reader know what is about to happen. The opening sentence of the paragraph is a bit like the thesis statement of the essay. It sets up the agenda and helps you to check that you are efficiently and effectively doing what you set out to do.

4. Does the actual content of the essay reflect a substantial and skillful research effort?

Your mark for the essay and presentation will include credit for the amount of reading that you did in preparation for your essay, and for any appropriate initiatives you took in using library or other resources to find needed evidence or information. Initiatives in finding secondary sources are usually rewarded only when the sources found are reasonably up-to-date and of genuine scholarly value. Please be aware that internet sources are usually NOT appropriate academic sources. There are also a number of books on Chinese civilization in the Fisher Library that one would not recommend for student essays. If you are finding your own sources, you should show them to your lecturer before you invest much time in them.

Credit will be given for initiatives in using the internet only if the source is a relevant primary source or is of comparable value to available scholarly print materials.

Popular, journalistic, textbook or encyclopaedia-type secondary materials are not appropriate sources for university-level essays, whether they are in print form or on the internet.

There are no marks at all for having a long list of sources in your bibliography. What matters is the extent to which the actual content of your essay reflects a solid research effort.

5. Have the source materials been used skillfully, and does the essay show good comprehension of the source materials?

The key issue here is whether your evidence and illustrative material have been chosen aptly and presented convincingly, with good understanding. You can expect that effective use of primary sources, including direct quotation where appropriate, will be rewarded. (N.B. Since your essay is in English, any quotations of material in languages other than English must be translated into English). Skill in drawing on ideas in secondary sources (with proper acknowledgement) will also attract marks. Excessive reliance upon limited amounts of text will lose you marks.

6. Does the writing show a high degree of originality? Has paraphrase been avoided, as well as all forms of plagiarism?

In instructing his contemporaries about how to do science, the English philosopher Francis Bacon suggested, in a book published in 1620, that a scientist should be like a bee, which ‘gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this’, he went on, ‘is the true business of philosophy’ for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it’ but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested’.

Checklist:

1. Have you cited all the sources from which you borrowed ideas?

2. Have you put in direct quotation marks all the phrases, clauses and sentences that you used from other authors?

3. Have you given details of all the works cited in your essay in the reference list at the end of your essay? Note that only works cited in your essay should be included in the reference list.

4. Have you done a spell check of your essay?

5. Have you done a word count of your essay? Note that the word count excludes the references.

6. Print the screen on (or take a photo of) Canvas of the message that shows that you have successfully uploaded your essay.

7. If you encounter problems in submitting to Canvas, print the screen (or take a photo) of the error message. Try submitting your file 10 minutes later. If you encounter the same problem, try again after another 10 minutes. If you encounter the same problem over three trials, email me right away your file together with the print- screen error message files, which show the time and date of your unsuccessful attempt to submit.