Right number/kind of works for Oral Commentary?

[balloon]

For our Oral commentary, we are doing:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Othello by Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare

The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Is four the normal number of works studied? I acknowledge that Othello and Much Ado are rather simple, but Wuthering Heights is an intense book, and Chaucer will be difficult, considering we have only studied the prologue, not the body, so we can't relate well to the rest of the text. Plus... the language is vaguely archaic. I love all the works we have, but is it normal to do 4, and rather difficult ones at that? Is that the point?

[Xelar]

Are you talking about part 2, which at the end you're doing the 15 minute individual commentary?

We're doing the following: Hamlet, Poems of Carol Ann Duffy, Open Secrets and An Autobiography Janet Frame. The autobiography will not be included in the commentary though... so we're reading four but the commentary will only incorporate three. It obviously varies school to school but mine seem much simpler compared to yours.

[Chelleee]

assuming that your talking about the IOC for english,

for SL we had 1 play and 2 poets being king lear, poems by kenneth slessor and poems by william blake respectively

as for HL they had the same but also the book Jane Eyre ontop of that

so,

SL = 3 works

HL = 4 works

but what did vary for us was the number of extracts since we are such a small class...

[Bishup]

Wuthering Height what an awesome book, I did that for GCSE. I know it inside and out. Also a question what do you actually have to talk about in your oral commentary in terms of the litterature? Do you compare themes?

[Vvi]

4 books are generally studied for the oral commentary, and your commentary will be on an extract from one of them. Some school's allow you to express a preference for 2 or 3 texts that you would like to do your commentary on (which means that you don't have to study all four). Other don't.

The difficulty of the books varies according to the teacher. We had Animal Farm, Measure for Measure, Jane Eyre and an anthology of war poems by Wilfred Own and Siegfreid Sassoon. Be aware that the extracts you are given to analyze will only be from very significant parts in the book (soliloquys, action scenes, a scene with a lot of imagery or where something is revealed) and they will be between 30-40 lines. Your teacher will not pick a random page in a novel for you to analyze.

And Bishup, in the commentary you analyze the extract like you would a written commentary. There should be an introduction (where you state where the extract is form, novel, who wrote it, summarize in one or two sentences what the extract describes and why it is important in the context of the book). Then comes the body, where you should have topic sentences, and this should be divided into paragraphs (e.g. one paragraph about imagery, one about the effect of punctuation, one about characterization, etc.) Finally, you should have a conclusion that summarizes your analysis, and describes the overall effect of the devices the author has used to convery his/her message. You can talk about themes, but don't limit it to just that.

In order to get all of what I wrote above in, you need to write down topic sentences in your 20 minutes of planning, notes on what you will say, and structure it. Don't have notes all over the page and expect to come up with something coherent. You get 5 marks for structure I think, so don't throw them away by deciding to only make notes and wing it.

[Mattias]

Not the normal books for my school.

I would like to say in my opinion, Wuthering Heights is not as easy as you make it out to be.

Great book though.