The following needs to be completed by...
- Wednesday 30th January '13 (13C)
- Thursday 31st January '13 (13A)
- Complete your first draft of your Critical Investigation.
- It must be a word processed 2000 word essay (with a precise word count included at the end).
- Also, include correctly set out references, quotes and footnotes. Footnotes should take the following form - Author Surname, Author First Name Initial (Year of Publication), Page Number(s). e.g...Lacey, N. (2009). p. 122. They should not appear all together at the end of the essay but at the foot of the page where they appear.
- Where the next reference is from the same text and the same page use ibid. (in italics). This means 'in the same place' in Latin. If it's from the same text but a different page you include the new page reference too. e.g. ibid. p23.
- A full bibliography must be submitted. (See the December Academic Research Task for help with this) . The first section should be titled 'Works Cited' and will contain everything that you make direct reference to in your essay. Divide it into 'Books', 'Newspapers & Magazines', 'Internet' and 'Moving Image Texts'. The second section should be called 'Works Consulted' and will cover all the additional research you did but that didn't necessarily get directly quoted. This should have the same subheadings as the first section. Books should be listed in alphabetical order, by author's surname. Use BibMe to help you do this correctly, using the APA format for books. e.g. Lacey, N. (2009). Image and Representation (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Here's a good example of a bibliography.
- Two copies are necessary. Hand in a hard copy (on paper) on the deadline day, and this needs to have one and a half spacing. Also paste it up on your blog.
If you're in any doubt about what this all should look like then please check out some of the finished grade 'A' and 'B' essays from: (2012) (2011), (2010), (2009), (2008), (2007), (2006). But remember that those from 2009 and earlier were for a different specification and had to be 3000 words, unlike yours (which should be 2000).
They will be helpful, though, when thinking about how to write your essay (what to include in the introduction and conclusion, how to structure the work, how to set out quotes, the correct tone, and how much research to include - they each contain between 20 and 40 footnotes - you should aim for around 30.)
But please ensure that all writing is done in your own words. Plagiarism is a very serious business and anyone found simply copying from other sources (either students or books/websites) will be in real trouble. And you will be found out if you do! We're not stupid - we know how you write, and we know very well what was in the previous studies (and there are numerous online checkers, er Google, that we can feed your work into to see if it has been plagiarised).
This is the big one so no excuses and good luck!!
