The Major Work: Imaginative or Critical Composition
What the Major Work asks of you
The Major Work is an extended composition - imaginative, critical or hybrid - of roughly 4,000–6,000 words (or a script/suite of poems of comparable substance), accompanied by a Reflection Statement. The examiner is not looking for a topic; they are looking for a conceptual through-line: a governing idea that the form itself helps you interrogate. Understand three concepts above all: conceptual coherence (every formal choice serves the idea), textual form (why prose, not verse; why a fragmentary structure, not linear narrative), and context (the traditions, debates or texts your work enters into and departs from).
Traps that appear in questions
Candidates lose marks by treating the Major Work as a theme rather than an argument. "A story about grief" is a subject; "a story that tests whether elegy can ever be honest" is a concept. Another trap is form as decoration - using a diary structure or unreliable narrator because it seems sophisticated, without the concept requiring it. A third is unearned scope: too many characters, settings or allusions, none developed. Questions often probe the relationship between your work and its precursors; be ready to name what you are revising, not merely echoing.
Rule of thumb
Write a one-sentence conceptual statement - "My work explores X by doing Y in form Z" - and test every section against it. If a passage cannot be justified by that sentence, cut it. A worked example: a student writing about colonial memory might use a critical essay on the elegiac tradition, or an imaginative sequence in which a settler's journal is progressively overwritten by an uncredited Indigenous voice - the second is stronger because the form enacts the concept.
Drafting discipline
Plan for at least three substantive drafts with documented revision between them; the quality of the final artefact matters, but so does evidence of deliberate shaping.