After we had produced our first draft of each of our articles, we gave a PDF to Alex and he sent all of them to Jenny. She then replied and gave us all feedback on what she thought of our articles and how we could improve on them. Below is the email that she sent to Alex with the feedback.
"Hi Alexander
Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you earlier – have had some problems with Acrobat Reader, mainly unprintable fonts, so could only read the articles onscreen, rather than in hard copy, which is usually the easiest way to comment. So these comments re very brief – wil give you more detailed feedback at the next stage.
A very promising start – but across the board, sone problems in the balance of information and opinion. You really need to start from thinking about the essential information your readers are going to need for the purposes of the exam (Matt and Tara start off vry well in this respect) , and resource them factually and theoretically before you launch off into your own views. To take just two examples, I think Natalie’s pece, which is very factual but well informed, gets this nearly right, although it could do with some references to theory; whereas Philippa’s aricle on Facebook is very lively and personal but needs much more factual research and detailed examples of Facebook use to support the arguments, and in particular to justify some of her remarks about Facebook ‘addiction’ - which does play a bit worryingly to the ‘moral panics’ often expressed about social networking. Similarly, James’ piece on Wikipedia needs a lot more data and theoretical references to support his personal views – and he needs to unpick his section about ‘How ‘true’ is Wikipedia’, in which he makes some fairly general assumptions. Across the range of the pieces, I think you’re covering interesting stuff and have got lots of good ideas, but often there’s too much padding and not enough planning to incorporate more critical and theoretical issues.
Have to rush, but will feed back more at the next draft. Do think about planning, though – sometimes its really helpful to incorporate web references and exampoles into your initial planning from the very start. The use of real-life examples, with weblinks and acknowledged quotes, is what will make these pieces really useful to readers.
Hope this helps – although it’s very genral. Get back to me if you want me to offer more detailed advice at this stage.
Keep up the good work!
Jenny"
Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you earlier – have had some problems with Acrobat Reader, mainly unprintable fonts, so could only read the articles onscreen, rather than in hard copy, which is usually the easiest way to comment. So these comments re very brief – wil give you more detailed feedback at the next stage.
A very promising start – but across the board, sone problems in the balance of information and opinion. You really need to start from thinking about the essential information your readers are going to need for the purposes of the exam (Matt and Tara start off vry well in this respect) , and resource them factually and theoretically before you launch off into your own views. To take just two examples, I think Natalie’s pece, which is very factual but well informed, gets this nearly right, although it could do with some references to theory; whereas Philippa’s aricle on Facebook is very lively and personal but needs much more factual research and detailed examples of Facebook use to support the arguments, and in particular to justify some of her remarks about Facebook ‘addiction’ - which does play a bit worryingly to the ‘moral panics’ often expressed about social networking. Similarly, James’ piece on Wikipedia needs a lot more data and theoretical references to support his personal views – and he needs to unpick his section about ‘How ‘true’ is Wikipedia’, in which he makes some fairly general assumptions. Across the range of the pieces, I think you’re covering interesting stuff and have got lots of good ideas, but often there’s too much padding and not enough planning to incorporate more critical and theoretical issues.
Have to rush, but will feed back more at the next draft. Do think about planning, though – sometimes its really helpful to incorporate web references and exampoles into your initial planning from the very start. The use of real-life examples, with weblinks and acknowledged quotes, is what will make these pieces really useful to readers.
Hope this helps – although it’s very genral. Get back to me if you want me to offer more detailed advice at this stage.
Keep up the good work!
Jenny"
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