Throughout the year, I attended seminars with James on Wednesdays. These seminars have really helped to move my essay forward and give me more of an understanding about how to structure it.

Quite a few of the seminars required us to watch small clips, and then describe the scene in a ‘true sentence’. This is a sentence which states the obvious, such as ‘the bear sat in the chair’. We then elaborated these sentences to make them longer and more descriptive. So, the true sentence earlier became ‘the fuzzy brown bear slouched lazily into the white, unstable chair’. This technique can be applied when writing our essays as we can write a short true sentence about something were looking at for research, like a book, and then develop that sentence to make it more complex to give the audience more insight into the quote/piece of information.

After we had gained this understanding, we then gathered in groups to discuss what question we were going to answer. This was extremely helpful as at the time, I was very unsure about which question I wanted to explore. The also group gave me some ideas about topics. Another group task was to describe an image in less than ten words. This was quite difficult, but important when writing an essay as you want to be concise.

For one seminar, we had a visit from Amanda Tinker, who gave us a very descriptive insight into APA6th referencing. She went into detail about why it is important to reference, the dangers of not referencing, what to reference and how to reference. As I had no idea what APA6 was, this was a huge benefit for me as it showed me exactly what to do.

For the last few weeks leading up to the deadline, we focused on peer assessment and how to better our essays along with how to tackle the abstract.