Description

ELT107
Analysing Prose:
Short Fiction and Essays

Tutor-Marked Assignments 01-02

July 2023 Presentation

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 2 of 8
ELT107
TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENTS 01-02
Assessment Strategy
The overall assessment weighting for this course is as follows:
Assessment Weight
Allocation

Component

Tutor-Marked Assignment 01 20% Overall Continuous Assessment Score
(OCAS) constitutes 50% of your final
mark.

Tutor-Marked Assignment 02 30%
ECA 50% Overall Examinable Score (OES)
constitutes 50% of your final mark.

TOTAL 100%
You must get a minimum score of 40% for each component (OCAS and OES) in order to
pass the entire course.

TMA Submission
It is strongly recommended that you make an early submission to check the originality report
and, if necessary, make amendments to your document for resubmission. Note that the Turnitin
report is usually generated immediately after the first submission; however, subsequent reports
may take up to one day to generate. Do note that Turnitin will not accept any further
submissions AFTER the cut-off time. There is a 12-hour grace period after the cut-off time,
which is not an extended deadline but solely meant for solving any technical problems that you
may encounter while attempting to make a submission before the cut-off time. Please email
Canvas Support immediately (with relevant screenshots and your TMA attached) and follow
up with Canvas Support first thing in the morning to ensure that the problem is resolved before
the grace period is over.
One late submission is allowed only if no prior submissions were made before the cut-off time.
Do note that the Canvas system will automatically deduct penalty marks for every day that
your assignment is late. With this automatic deduction, there will be no need to request for
extensions from your tutor because your tutor does not have the mandate to over-ride the
Canvas system settings. You will need to form your own judgement as to how many marks you
are willing to forego for each extra day that you gain to work on your assignment.
Take care to ensure that you upload the correct TMA document to the correct folder of the
correct course. Requests to transfer incorrectly uploaded documents to the correct folder will
require an official appeal (and an administrative fee).
Back up your TMA at all times. Once you have uploaded your TMA (in Word document format
only), retain the Turnitin digital receipt as evidence of a successful submission. View your
submission to ensure that the entire document has been uploaded successfully.

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 3 of 8
Plagiarism and Collusion

The assignment is to be completed on your own. You may discuss the TMA with your course-
mates; however, the assignment must be written independently. Do not share your notes, drafts,

or final TMA with anyone before the marked TMAs are returned to you.
Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material so
that you can write up your assignment in your own words. Quotations should be used sparingly.
Simply citing the source of “copied” chunks of text does not excuse it from plagiarism. Do
ensure that any paraphrasing is done appropriately, even if you use text from your own work
that you have submitted as part of another assignment for the same or another course.
The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as
your own, or recycling of contents from your own earlier marked TMA from the same course
or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment which is the same or very similar
to another student’s). Both are very serious academic offences. Please refer to the Student
Handbook on the penalties of plagiarism or collusion. You are strongly advised to submit your
TMA early, check the plagiarism report yourself, and if needed revise and resubmit your TMA
before the submission deadline.
Be sure to use the proper citation style both in-text and in your list of references or works cited.
The ELT courses require the use of MLA style. There are a number of online reference sources,
such as
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide
/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 4 of 8
TMA01
The cut-off date for this assignment is Sunday, 10 September 2023, 11.55pm.
Note to Students:
You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the
TMA, SUSS PI No., Your Name, and Submission Date.

Question 1
Read the following extract from “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. Discuss how
Orwell’s use of narrative perspective contributes to the critical thought of the extract. Present
your analysis in one PEEL paragraph of no more than 250 words.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a
mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an
elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it
put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely
to avoid looking a fool.

(50 marks)

Question 2
Read the following extract from “A Manifesto for Arts Funding” by Alfian Sa’at. Analyse and
discuss Alfian’s use of language in the production of thematic meaning. Present your analysis
in one PEEL paragraph of no more than 250 words.
6. Taking funding away from anti-establishment art will not create pro-establishment
art. In fact, it is the opposite. If the desire is to create art which supports the status
quo, then they can only emerge by responding to the works which challenge the status
quo. Otherwise these pro-establishment works are just extensions of the status quo,
characterised only by their repetitiveness and superfluity.

(50 marks)

Student Notes
Please answer each question with a properly structured essay in continuous prose: your
marker expects for each answer an essay with an introduction, PEEL paragraphs, and a
conclusion.

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 5 of 8
• Strive to write thematic topic sentences/structure your essay around critical
thought/theme. I cannot emphasise this point enough. Literary techniques are used to
illustrate themes—not the other way around.
• Do note that simply asserting that a particular device “makes the reader feel
[something]” is not sufficient close reading. You must argue for how readerly
response is produced by the technique. You are expected to demonstrate the
mechanism by which such feelings are produced.
• Do not write more than 250 words for each response. Your marker will not read
beyond the 250th word. Please furnish a word count at the end of each response.
• You are expected to present your work as a Microsoft Word document. Work
submitted in any other format will not be marked.
Question 1:
Narrative perspective refers specifically to the point of view from which a story/argument is
presented—a work is presented in first, second, or third person narrative perspective. There is
no other accepted interpretation of the term “narrative perspective” for this assignment.
Specifically: it does not refer to the attitude/view the narrator has towards their subject
matter.
Your answer should demonstrate keen understanding of how narrative perspective functions,
the readerly effects it achieves, and the meanings produced through its use. Strive to go
further than generic, textbook interpretation of “perspective.” It is fairly elementary to
suggest that perspective puts readers into the narrator’s shoes/produce intimacy, etc. Your
analysis should recognise these effects, and go beyond.
You must address critical thought in your response. Indeed, your response should be
structured mainly around critical thought — analysis of perspective should bulwark your read
of the critical thought.
Question 2:
This question demands that you analyse Alfian’s use of language in his Manifesto. Fruitful
areas of exploration would include his use of punctuation and diction, his grammatical and
syntactic constructions, and the style/tone/voice used for the extract.
As with Question 1, please ensure that you address thematic understanding of the extract. A
discussion that addresses language – without substantial engagement with the text’s theme(s)
– will not do well.

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 6 of 8
TMA02
The cut-off date for this assignment is Sunday, 8 October 2023, 11.55pm.
Note to Students:
You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the
TMA, SUSS PI No., Your Name, and Submission Date.

Question
Read the following extract from Nadine Gordimer’s “The Ultimate Safari” and discuss how
Gordimer’s narrative style contributes to our understanding of a major theme in the
story/extract. You must write a properly structured answer in which you examine appropriate
evidence from the extract and show how it relates to the story’s theme. Write no more than
1,000 words.
So we started to go away again. There were women and other children like me who
had to carry the small ones on their backs when the women got tired. A man led us
into the Kruger Park; are we there yet, are we there yet, I kept asking our
grandmother. Not yet, the man said, when she asked him for me. He told us we had to
take a long way to get round the fence, which he explained would kill you, roast off
your skin the moment you touched it, like the wires high up on poles that give electric
light in our towns. I’ve seen that sign of a head without eyes or skin or hair on an iron
box at the mission hospital we used to have before it was blown up.
When I asked the next time, they said we’d been walking in the Kruger Park for an
hour. But it looked just like the bush we’d been walking through all day, and we
hadn’t seen any animals except the monkeys and birds which live around us at home,
and a tortoise that, of course, couldn’t get away from us. My first-born brother and the
other boys brought it to the man so it could be killed and we could cook and eat it. He
let it go because he told us we could not make a fire; all the time we were in the Park
we must not make a fire because the smoke would show we were there. Police,
wardens, would come and send us back where we came from. He said we must move
like animals among the animals, away from the roads, away from the white people’s
camps. And at that moment I heard – I’m sure I was the first to hear – cracking
branches and the sound of something parting grasses and I almost squealed because I
thought it was the police, wardens – the people he was telling us to look out for – who
had found us already. And it was an elephant, and another elephant, and more
elephants, big blots of dark moved wherever you looked between the trees. They were
curling their trunks round the red leaves of the Mopane trees and stuffing them into
their mouths. The babies leant against their mothers. The almost grown-up ones
wrestled like my first-born brother with his friends – only they used trunks instead of
arms. I was so interested I forgot to be afraid. The man said we should just stand still
and be quiet while the elephants passed. They passed very slowly because elephants
are too big to need to run from anyone.

(100 marks)

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 7 of 8
Student Notes
Before you write your TMA, you should do the following:
• Read and understand the entire short story “The Ultimate Safari.” Even though this
TMA may appear to test your understanding of this extract, you must understand the
whole story (especially with regard to its theme). Your reading of the extract cannot
present ideas that contradict the narrative/ideas of the story.
• Read the study materials on the short story. You may use the ideas from the Study
Guide, slides, and class discussion, but make sure that you develop the ideas; do not
simply regurgitate material. Remember to cite your sources properly in MLA style.
• Refer to Study Unit 3 on Essay Writing Skills in your Study Guide; this explains the
use of the PEEL structure, which provides a framework for your essay. Essays that do
not use the PEEL structure are very unlikely to do well.
• You are reminded that topic sentences are to be thematic. They are to be structured
around ideas, not characters, or plot moments. Essays that relate the plot of the
extract/text, without interpretation, will not do well.
• Be precise with evidence, and fastidious with close-reading. Avoid large tracts of
evidence: rather, quote selectively, and interrogate your quote thoroughly. T. S. Eliot
once called what we are doing with close-reading “the lemon-squeezer school of
criticism.” Go squeeze that lemon!
• This assignment expects you to identify a major theme of the story (of which there are
several), and to explore the writer’s explication of the theme. Do not go off-topic by
simply writing a general essay on “The Ultimate Safari” or by answering a different
question. This is a close reading exercise, so you must thoroughly examine the given
extract and provide your individual response to it, in the light of the question. The
cultural context/setting of the story is significant. Strong answers would likely address
meaningfully the sociocultural context of the story.
• The question, in particular, queries you about Gordimer’s use of narrative style.
Narrative style is produced by a diverse range of techniques—this permissiveness of
scope is by design. You may address in your answer techniques related to literary
form, or on Gordimer’s use of language. Other productive areas of exploration include
Gordimer’s use of narrative perspective, and setting.

• Note: In an essay of only 1,000 words, you must be selective. Do not provide a line-
by-line analysis of the extract. It is better to focus on just two or three good points that

you explore in depth than to skim over a whole range of points that you barely
develop. You should also avoid using up your word count by giving a mere summary
of the extract or the short story. Do not exceed the word limit; markers will not read
beyond the word limit, so anything extra that you write will be ignored.
• Write a properly structured academic essay in continuous prose without sub-headings.
• I am expecting an introduction and a conclusion to this essay.
• Please write simply and plainly. Good writing is easy to read.
On Citation:
Cite all your sources, as citation is essential in academic writing.
• You must cite the short story and the quotes that you use from it.

ELT107 Tutor-Marked Assignment 01-02

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS)