Drafting and Process Documentation
Why process is assessed
The Major Work is the product of sustained, documented drafting. Process documentation - journals, draft folders, annotated versions, feedback records - is not busywork; it is the evidence that the finished work was deliberately made and that you can account for its evolution. The examiner is interested in iterative revision: the capacity to diagnose a weakness, act on it, and evaluate the result.
Concepts to command
Understand drafting as thinking (each draft tests a hypothesis about the work), feedback literacy (distinguishing useful critique from flattery or taste), and version control (knowing what changed between drafts and why). Appreciate the difference between editing (sentence-level) and revising (structural, conceptual). Strong process documentation shows a trajectory: an early problem, an intervention, a measurable improvement.
Traps in questions
Candidates often produce retrospective tidying - a clean narrative of smooth progress that no real drafting ever follows. Examiners value honest records of dead ends. Another trap is undated or undifferentiated material: dozens of files with no sense of sequence or rationale. A third is feedback without response: comments recorded but never acted on. Finally, avoid documenting effort (hours spent) rather than decision (what changed and why).
Worked example
Weak entry: "Worked on chapter two today, added more description." Strong entry: "Draft 2, 14 March. Feedback from two readers: the middle section loses tension because the narrator explains rather than withholds. Hypothesis: cut all explanatory paragraphs and let the journal fragments carry the backstory. Tested in draft 3 - the section is 600 words shorter and the reveal now lands two pages later. Kept the cut."
Rule of thumb
Date every draft, annotate every major cut, and record at least one reversal - a change you tried and undid - with your reasoning.
Critical and Creative Engagement with Form and Context
The heart of the course
Extension 2 rewards work that thinks through form and about context. Form encompasses genre, structure, voice, syntax, rhythm, punctuation, white space and medium; context encompasses the historical moment of composition, the tradition a work inhabits, and the ideological assumptions it carries. The strongest works demonstrate that form is meaning-bearing: that changing a sentence's length, a narrator's gender, or a poem's line breaks alters what the work can say.
Concepts to command
Understand genre as contract (conventions create expectations you may satisfy, frustrate or transform), intertextuality (texts speaking to texts), appropriation and revision (reworking a precursor from a new position), and positionality (the situatedness of both author and reader). Also grasp defamiliarisation: making the familiar strange so its assumptions become visible.
Traps in questions
Frequent errors: treating context as biography ("I wrote this because of events in my life") rather than as historical and textual situatedness; using form as ornament without conceptual justification; appropriating marginal voices without ethical reflection; and confusing innovation with novelty - a gimmick that does not serve the idea. Questions may ask how your work interrogates a tradition; be ready to show both debt and departure.
Worked example
A student adapts the sonnet to address climate grief. Weak: fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme, unchanged in function. Strong: the volta is deliberately withheld until the final couplet, so the poem's formal expectation of resolution is denied - the form enacts the refusal of consolation the concept demands. The student can then explain, in the Reflection Statement, exactly which convention was kept, which broken, and why.
Rule of thumb
For every formal choice, ask: what would change if I did the opposite? If nothing, the choice is decorative.