Archive for October 21st, 2009

• Directive verbs and their associated structure

  Date: 2009.10.21 | Category: Study Reflections, Unit SSK12 | Response: 0

  Reflection
  Unit: SSK12
  Week: 8
  Date: 21 October 2009

  Koral provides some explanation regarding essay structure according to the directive verbs found in the topic question:

  Ok thanks for the reminder, at this point in the edsay process I like to post some stuff from a colleague at Murdoch, Ian Cook:

  Ian Cook tells us that there are four basic types of directive words to be found in essay questions and, therefore, four basic essay structures. Each structure then will have a slightly different plan style. (Essay questions will also contain ‘content words’, i.e. what concepts or ideas the essay is about.)

  Sometimes there will be more than one directive word in a question however.
  In this case, the essay will need to be organised into section in which each of the directive words is used as the basis for the structure of that section.

  The types of question are as follows:
  1) ‘is/can/does’ type of questions
  2) ‘explain/outline/why/account for’
  3) ‘discuss/critically assess/critically evaluate’
  4) ‘to what extent’ type of questions..

  (“How” is a difficult one as it could be “How does X relate to Y?” or it could be “How important is X?”)

  These do not exhaust the possibilities with respect to directive words and are intended to illustrate the general principle.
  Answering a question or responding to a topic with one type of directive word is entirely different from answering a question or responding to a topic with another type of directive word.
  Identifying the directive word that governs a question or topic means that we can identify the basic structure (what I refer to as a “block plan”) of the essay that would answer the question or respond effectively to the topic. The basic structures that match the types of directive words are indicated by the following:

  1) yes case-no case-my case or no case-yes case-my case
  2) list
  3) model & analysis
  4) continuum

  OK. I will post further on these structure soon.
  What have you got there in relation to these models?
  K.