EE1 Reflection Writing

Common Module:
Literary Worlds

Contents

1. Syllabus outcomes
page 2
2. Opportunities for Reflection
Examples of reflective and
evaluative writing
page 3 – 7
3. Reflection Skills
page 8 – 9
4. Reflection Checklist page 9
5. Practice Task: Bitto page 10
6. Practice Task: Winterson
p11 - 12
7. Practise Tasks: Koch p13 – 15
8. Practise Task: Powers p15 - 16

1
REFLECTION: WHY? It’s a syllabus outcome

EE12-5
A student reflects on and evaluates the development of their conceptual understanding and
the independent and collaborative writing and creative processes

Students:
Engage personally with texts
• reflect on and evaluate the growth of their own conceptual understanding of
complex ideas and how they are represented in texts

Develop and apply contextual knowledge

• reflect on the ways deep personal engagement with texts enhances understanding
of the complex relationships between texts, composers, responders and contexts

Understand and apply knowledge of language forms and features

• reflect on knowledge, skills and confidence gained through independent and
collaborative processes, to use language in creative and powerful ways
• use evaluative language* to articulate the processes of independent investigation
and the insights gained through the research process

Respond to and compose texts

• evaluate the effectiveness of individual and collaborative research, creative and
critical compositions and presentations
• critically engage in the drafting, revising, refining and publishing processes of
composition

*Evaluative = positive, negative or critical language that judges the worth of something. It includes
language to express feelings and opinions, to make judgements about aspects of people such as
their behaviour, and to assess the quality of objects such as literary works. It includes evaluative
words. The language used by a speaker or writer to give a text a particular perspective (for example
judgemental, emotional, critical) in order to influence how the audience will respond to the content
of the text.

SOURCE DOCUMENT: NESA Syllabus English Extension 1

2
How can the “reflection” outcome be assessed and examined in your lessons,
Assessments, Trial or HSC?
More importantly, how can you respond?

Opportunities for Reflection How does this sound on paper? Examples!

(hypotheticals)
Reflect on the growth of my About a timed task: how to control the tone of a
conceptual understanding. narrative
Version 1: My aim in this narrative was to craft a
superior and subtly critical tone, with the
anonymous narrator subverting the events as they
occur. Written in third person, the aerial view of
this wedding reception causes the reader to feel
like a guest at this wedding. “Platters of
miniature bagels are trayed among the guests
before being laid out like sacrificial beasts on the
buffet table. As with carrion stripped of flesh, the
bagel trays are bare again within minutes, and
quickly removed, then replaced, and once more
removed. ” The tone of detachment takes no joy
in the rituals of the wedding party. I had practised
writing this scene with two different tonal
approaches to show my understanding of how to
write tone. My experiments in tone show how the
impression of events is implicit and can be
crafted with subtlety.

Version 2: I aimed to write with a celebratory

tone. The third-person narrator guides the reader
among the assortment of increasingly inebriated
guests. The intention is to show each character
with warmth and humour. A sentence I crafted
for the dancefloor scene uses a joyful tone:
“Nothing could stop Tommy and Betty from
joining hands with the others, not even the free
tickets they could have been using to see the
Seven Sopranos at the Avarighe RSL. They
became part of the whirling, shrieking circle, a
mandala turning steadily and eternally on the
parquetry floor of the Sunset Bay Bowling Club.”
The close symbolic focus on the couple’s
“hands” and the dancers “whirling” in a

3
 figurative “mandala” contribute to this ecstatic
tone.
Reflect on the process of developing About a hand-in task: narrative
a piece of writing. I found that three different peer responses to my
second draft positioned me to better understand
audience response. I realised I had written
insufficient information about one character yet
provided a surfeit of detail for another character.
In reflecting on reader response, I gained clarity
about how to craft characters.

About a hand-in task: analytical

My second paragraph focused on how Cooke
increased the sense of dread as the narrator
descends into frenzied gambling. I chose the
following as my key phrase: “Soon all was ready
for the next spin and Grant was crushed against
the wall with no idea of the whereabouts of the
man with whom he had laid his bet.” I continued
to focus on the recurrence of the verb “spin” to
highlight my understand of the character’s
increasing loss of control. Wake in Fright is
devasting due to its Grant’s increasing lack of
agency, whose powerlessness in the outback is an
allegory for the alienation of Eurocentric
colonisers at the mercy of each other’s mutually
predatory exploitation.

Reflect on your choices made in About a timed task: narrative

language. My aim in using the term “estuarine” was to
evoke the setting’s natural beauty and show my
efforts in being precise about the geographical
context for this story. In addition, I added some
imagined street names – such as ‘Melaleuca
Drive’ and ‘Banksia Avenue’ to deliberately
create an unmistakably Australian setting.

4
Evaluate the efficacy (effectiveness) About a timed task: narrative
of creative choices Eschewing the opportunity for omniscient
narration, I choice to continue using first person
narrative to establish the sense of my character,
Phil’s, unreliability. On the surface, I crafted Phil
as a likeable character whose grizzled good looks
appeal to the largely female crowd at the “Sunset
Bay Bowl-oh”. By introducing sporadic,
unspoken interjections extracted from Phil’s
interior monologue, including his unsettling
thoughts whic stereotype his Muslim and Hindu
neighbours, I intended to make the reader
uncomfortable and disturb their earlier
impressions of an innocent suburban scenario.

About a timed task: evaluative/critical

From my reading of the excerpt from Loaded, I
was moved and inspired by Tsiolkas’ passionate
evocation of the character’s struggle. The
author’s deliberate parallelism between the
chaotic scene on the street and Art’s interior self-
loathing is evident and many readers would lack
sympathy for Art’s increasing spiritual agony. I
found this character’s distressed emotions
revealed a sense of loneliness – and this causes us
as readers to hope, however optimistically, for
this dire situation to resolve.

Reflect on the ambition and About a critical analysis

aspirations you had in crafting a In my above analysis of Becket’s Murphy, I
piece of writing aimed to express my contextual awareness of
Modernism buy referencing Becket’s early-career
influence from the prose writer James Joyce. I
aspired to also reveal my knowledge of Becket’s
legacy as an absurdist playwright by focusing on
the characters in this excerpt and the metaphor of
performance. It is evident that I understood the
narrative’s allegorical implication because of my
focus on Murphy’s “heart” as the symbolic
fulcrum around which his fellow characters turn.
My analysis referred to Murphy’s metaphorical
5
 “magnetism” to reveal my capability of rising
above a literal interpretation of events.

About a narrative
I aimed to tell the entire life story of a Hebridean
shepherd in my narrative through five distinct
vignettes. The first and last are told by his mother
and daughter respectively. The third vignette is
related by his wife. Only the second and fourth
are told by male characters: the shepherd’s
football coach and a neighbouring landowner. I
realised the scope of this story could be too vast,
so as I wrote it, I found a way to manage the
boundaries of the reader’s expectations by always
bringing up one of two or three recurring motifs
in each of the vignettes: the skull of a ram, a
medieval stone structure used as a barn, and a red
wheelbarrow that the characters keep tripping
over or leaving out in the rain.

Evaluate the ways in which the About a given excerpt

author of the text establishes a strong Conte’s creation of Bauer is a feat worthy of the
sense of their character’s world. best magicians to grace the stages of Vegas: he
has made a likeable Nazi! The field surgeon Paul
Bauer is not strictly speaking a Nazi in the sieg-
heiling, goose-stepping sense, but he part of the
German military machine invading Russia in
1941. This passage from The Tolstoy Estate
convinces us that we too are freezing, exhausted
and oddly enough – falling in love. Bauer is
suffering profoundly alongside his fellow
German officers as they do their best to save the
lives of maimed soldiers during hours of
emergency surgery. Hitler’s army truly didn’t
believe they would follow in Napoleon’s
miniscule footsteps by freezing in Russia’s
midwinter a hundred years later, and the doctor’s
continual allusions to his clandestine, first edition
of War and Peace serves both as a comfort to
Bauer and the reader that the Germans also won’t
be raising their flag over Moscow. Although this
narrative appears to present a conventional
historical fiction tale, clearly the intertextual
Tolstovian frame and the humorous
characterisation of the Estate’s intellectual
6
 caretaker Katerina proves that the subtext offers
something powerful. Conte’s focus is clearly on
the futility of war and the agency of love when it
empowers people to rise above adversity. It is
through this subtext that readers view Bauer’s
world as a place in which his character is tested.
He will save Katerina and her books and risk his
own position of authority because the forces of
war – the futility, bigotry and violence – all stand
in contrast with what is offered at the Tolstoy
Estate: reason, beauty, intellect, choice and
desire.

Reflect on how your own context About a narrative: timed or hand-in task
has influenced your word choice and I was influenced by a line of dialogue from
focus on specific themes. Martin Freeman’s comedy series “Breeders”, in
which the father character despairs about a
household clean-up. Preferring clutter, the father
insists: “ I like stuff. It’s full of memories, and
gives context!” My own context as a descendent
of migrants has shaped my willingness to include
bilingual idioms and focus on the theme of
assimilation and its tribulations. The “Breeders”
father character, Paul, fears is that his children
will grow up without a strong identity. I decided
to echo this fear in the parent characters of my
narrative, Emile and Audette.

7
REFLECTION SKILLS

Here are the ways you can measurably improve your creative, critical, analytical and evaluative
writing skills, by reflecting on them:

1. Lexical Range
How aware are you of your vocabulary? What is the range of your vocabulary? In what ways do
you absorb new words, and how do you make sure you are using them correctly? Which words do
you love the best and what appeals to you about specific words? Are you aware of the extent to
which the words you use reveal something about your culture and values? How much casual or
formal research do you do to acquire new words?
This is the lexical knowledge expected for students 17 years of age: 36 000 to 136 000 words.
(Munro and McGregor, 2017; education.vic.edu.au/Literacy)
Where do you think you fit on this wordcount span? Are you aware that by adding extra words to
your lexical range, you can create a far greater impression with your writing, and that this will
increase your opportunities to delight, defy, disturb, dumbfound and dazzle your readers?

2. Imaginative Range
How fast can you make up a story? How fast can you change, adapt or expand on a plot idea? In
what ways do you improvise? How similar to imagining, is lying? Do you tell better stories when
you tell the truth? How much truthful material do you put into a story? Do you prefer to write in
the realm of the imaginary or the actual? Why does an unresolved or ambiguous story still feel so
satisfying to write? Have you ever tried writing something which is completely out of your own
first-hand experience, something you have never witnessed – and if so, what strategies do you use
to create authenticity? Do you find it is easier or preferable to write about what you know? In what
ways can it be fun to write a plot or character who is completely outside of your experience and
knowledge?

3. Conceptual Range
Which ideas appeal to you when you are writing? Are you aware of how to craft an implicit
meaning? Do you prefer for your themes and ideas to be on the surface – explicitly stated? How
aware are you of the differences between plot, theme, idea and concept – what are these differences,
in any? When you write, do you want your readers to learn something, or understand something?
How do you plan to impart concepts to readers, without “teaching” them? Are you aware of how

8
to write concepts implicitly, through allegory, parable, fable, metaphor and figurative language?
Do you believe it is useful or entertaining to “disguise” or “conceal” concepts from readers – why?

4. Sympathetic Range (Reader-Response Awareness)

Who will read your writing? Who would you like to see reading your writing? How do you plan
to change or challenge your reader’s expectations of what they are reading? If you know how your
mind works while you are reading, how do you think your readers will process your piece of
writing? What did you want your reader to enjoy? What did you want your reader to feel while
reading your narrative or analysis? How aware are you of the impact or effect of your words?

Reflection Checklist
You may always choose what to reflect on based on what emerged from your writing experiments,
practise tasks and timed or structured assessments. You will always be expected to refer in some
way to language choices, or those present in a provided text. Here is a checklist of possibilities:

❑ Allegory, fable, parable

❑ Character
❑ Context (social, historical, political, geographical, temporal)
❑ Contrast, paradox
❑ Description
❑ Humour – comic effects, satire, visual comedy, wordplay, absurdity
❑ Imagery, image, sensory language
❑ Languages – English(es), translation, multi-lingual influence, idiomatic variation
❑ Figurative language devices (“techniques”), including …
❑ Metaphor, extended metaphor
❑ Narrative voice, narration
❑ Simile, analogy, parallelism
❑ Style*
❑ Symbol, symbolism
❑ Sentences: length, varied lengths, grammatic accuracy or innovation
❑ Setting
❑ Specificity (context, setting, character, nature)
❑ Values (implicit, unchallenged, unspoken, subverted, exposed, indifferently documented)
*See the booklet “STYLE – Recognising Fiction”
9
 PRACTICE TASK: The Strays by Emily Bitto
Section I: Common Module — Literary Worlds
25 marks
Attempt Question 1
Allow about 1 hour for this section

Your answer will be assessed on how well you:

● demonstrate an understanding of the ideas and values of Literary Worlds and how they are shaped

and reflected in texts

● craft a sustained composition appropriate to the question demonstrating control of the use of

language

For me – for the rest of us – it started with fire. Waking in the night to the smell of smoke. I still do it
sometimes, and lurch from my bed before becoming conscious that it was a dream remnant, a faint
hallucination, a lingering of that other, darker world of dream that travels over so that smell can be
recalled for a moment as physical experience, the way it cannot be in normal life. What chemical
changes occur in our brains during sleep I do not know, but we must spend whole nights with the
smell of the sea or of or mothers’ bodies being minutely recreated in the laboratories of our heads.

An extract from the novel The Strays by Emily Bitto

Creative and critical response (25 marks)

Use the above extract to answer this question.

(a) The extract from ‘The Strays’ evokes the world of memory based upon smell. /15
• Compose a piece of imaginative writing in which smell evokes a world of memory/ies
for your protagonist.
• Your response should draw on your knowledge and understanding of the module
Literary Worlds.

(b) Critically analyse the way in which your creative choices in your writing for part (a) invite
the reader into your literary world and explain how these choices borrow or diverge from the
stylistic features of Bitto’s text. /10
• Your response should draw on your knowledge and understanding of how texts construct
private and remembered worlds.

10
 PRACTICE TASK: Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

Section I: Common Module — Literary Worlds

25 marks
Attempt Question 1
Allow about 1 hour for this section
Your answer will be assessed on how well you:
● demonstrate an understanding of the ideas and values of Literary Worlds and how they are
shaped and reflected in texts
● craft a sustained composition appropriate to the question demonstrating control of the use
of language

My name is Jordan. This is the first thing I saw.

It was night, about a quarter to twelve, the sky divided in halves, one cloudy, the other fair. The
clouds hung over the wood, there was no distance between them and the top of the trees. Where
the sky was clear, over the river and the flat fields newly ploughed the moon, almost full, shone
out of a yellow aureole and reflected in the bow of the water. There were cattle in the field
across, black against the slope of the hill, not moving, sleeping. One light, glittering from the
only house, looked like the moat-light of a giant’s castle. Tall trees flanked it. A horse ran loose
in the courtyard, its hooves sparking the stone.

Then the fog came. The fog from the river in thin spirals like spirits in a churchyard and
thickened with the force of a genie from a bottle. The bulrushes were buried first, then the trunks
of the trees, then the forks and the junctions. The top of the trees floated in the fog, making
suspended islands for the birds.

The cattle were all drowned and the moat-light, like a light –house, appeared and vanished and
vanished and appeared, cutting the air like a bright sword.

The fog came towards me and the sky that had been clear was covered up. It was bitterly cold,
my hair was damp and I had no hand –warmer. I tried to find the path but all I found were hares
with staring eyes, poised in the middle of the field and turned to stone. I began to walk with my

11
hands stretched out in front of me, as do those troubled in sleep, and in this way, for the first
time, I traced the lineaments of my own face opposite me.

An extract from the novel Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.

Creative and critical response (25 marks)

Use the above extract to answer this question.

Creative Writing
(a) The extract from ‘Sexing the Cherry’ evokes the world of memory based upon smell.

Compose a piece of imaginative writing in which smell evokes a world of

memory/ies for your protagonist.

/15

Critical Writing
(b) Critically analyse the way in which your creative choices in your writing for part (a)
invite the reader into your literary world and explain how these choices borrow or diverge
from the stylistic features of Winterson’s text.

Your response should draw on your knowledge and understanding of how texts
construct private and remembered worlds.

/10

12
Practise Task (3 options): “Langford” from Highways to a War by Christopher Koch

[Excerpt] “Langford”

Except for the marching feet and the static on the field radio, there was a large
quiet. I was wet from perspiration now as though I’d jumped into a pool. I look
around for Langford, who’d been at my elbow, and found that he’d gone. Then I
saw him. Following his usual practice, he was going forward with the troops
instead of seeking cover, walking fast beside the ditch that ran along the edge of
the highway. He was bare-headed; as usual, he carried a Leica and a backup
Nikon. The two American photographers moved not far behind him, getting off
some quick shots. As I watched them, they took cover behind some of the APC’s
in the paddy field; and at that moment, the firing began.

The noise was shattering: the hidden Khmer Rouge had opened up with mortars
from the trees, and the Cambodian mortar platoons in the paddy field began to
open up in response. Bill Wall and I looked at each other; there was too much
noise to speak. He pointed to the ditch and I nodded and tapped Wardlaw on the
shoulder. His face was white and oily: he looked dazed. I beckoned for him to
follow, and then ran for it.

When we got to the ditch and rolled in, we found the bearded man already in
occupancy, lying on his side. He grinned at me, still with a remarkably sanguine
expression, and I wondered if he knew that some of his bulk rose like a whale’s
above the level of the ditch. Behind me I could hear a squeezed voice saying
‘Christ almighty,’ and I knew that it was Wardlaw. I looked at a slight cut on my
thumb and remembered I’d done it in the kitchen of our flat in South Kensington,
opening a can two days ago: a harmless wound of peace, in a now-unreal
country, filling me with nostalgia. After a time, although the noise continued, I
raised my face just above the ditch to see what was happening.

13
“Langford” Practice Task 1
Creative writing

(a) Write a narrative which follows on from the paragraph ending, “I raised my face
just above the ditch to see what was happening.”
Your narrative may create any aspect of the world which the narrator and
Langford inhabit, and their responses to these circumstances. /20

Critical Writing

(b) Evaluate the ways in which the author Koch has used language to convey the
psychological and the physical world inhabited by his narrator and the
photographer, Langford.

/10

Langford Practice Task 2

Creative Writing
(a) Write a narrative which includes one character from this passage, in a setting
of your choice. You may choose a setting which is before OR after the events
shown in the given passage.
/20
Critical Writing
(b) Explain the creative decisions made in your choice of setting, tense, and
character. Suggest how these contribute to a credible narrative. /10

14
Langford Practice Task 3
Critical Writing
(a) Evaluate the stylistic elements Koch has included to establish the characters’
physical and psychological experience of time. /10

Creative Writing

(b) Craft a piece of original writing which focuses on a powerful or strained

relationship between the present and past. Include stylistic elements which
illustrate the character’s sense of time. /20

Practice Task from The Overstory by Richard Powers (edited)

[Excerpt: ”Patty”]

In the summer of her eighteenth year, preparing to head to Eastern Kentucky

University to study botany, she remembers the beech growing in its tub of soil,
out by the barn. How could she have forgotten the experiment? She replants the
beech in a spot where she and her father liked to sit on summer nights and listen
to what other people called silence.

Her father is her water, air, earth and sun. He teaches her how to see a tree, the
living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man
has yet figured out.

At university, Patricia blooms like something southern-facing. The air of the

sixties crackles as she crosses campus, a change in the weather, the smell of
days lengthening, the scent of possibility breaking the cast of outdated thought, a
clear wind rolling down from the hills. Her dorm room overflows with potted
plants. She’s not the only one her floor to fit a botanical garden between the
student desk and bunk bed. She cares for a bonsai* juniper that looks to be a
thousand years old, a spiky haiku of a creature with no scientific purpose at all.

15
 The girls from upstairs come down some nights to check on her. Let’s get Plant-
Patty drunk. Let’s fix Plant-Patty up with that beatnik econ guy. They force her to
listen to Elvis. They call her the Queen of Chlorophyll. She’s not of the herd.

Patty gets a job in the campus greenhouse – two hours stolen every morning
before classes. Genetics, plant physiology, and organic chemistry take her
through every evening. She studies every night until the library closes. Nothing
else moves her more than Peattie’s Natural Histories and other books from her
father’s shelves. They’re her endless refreshment.

Bonsai (noun) - a miniature, ornamental tree.

Questions

(a) Creative Response

Write a narrative, from your choice of narrative perspective, which describes a

significant event during the university years of the main character, Patty.

/20

Critical Response

Write a reflection in which you explain the specific language choices you made to
animate the main character’s relationship with her surroundings.

/10

16