Research
What research means here
Research in Extension 2 is not background reading added at the end; it is the inquiry that generates and disciplines the composition. It spans three kinds: conceptual (theoretical, historical or ethical material that sharpens your idea), textual (the literary tradition and specific precursors your work engages), and material (the concrete detail - dialect, geography, procedure - that gives the work texture and authority).
Concepts to command
Understand primary versus secondary sources, critical distance (using sources without ventriloquising them), and synthesis (bringing disparate sources into a productive tension rather than a list). Know the difference between research that decorates a work and research that structures it. Be able to articulate what you disagreed with in a source - disagreement is evidence of independent thinking.
Traps in questions
Examiners penalise name-dropping: theorists or authors invoked to signal sophistication but never used. Equally common is research that never reaches the page - a rich reading list with no trace in the composition's language or structure. Another trap is uncritical absorption: adopting a source's framing wholesale, producing derivative work. Finally, beware over-researching at the expense of drafting; the Major Work must actually be written.
Worked example
Suppose your work concerns migration and memory. Weak research: reading three novels about migration and listing them. Strong research: reading a sociologist on how migrant families narrate interrupted time, a poet who uses broken syntax to render that interruption, and a historian of your specific community - then asking where the three conflict, and letting that conflict shape your narrator's unreliable chronology.
Rule of thumb
Keep a research log with three columns: source, what it gave me, what I resisted. If the third column is empty, you have not read critically.