Today our group had our fifth, relatively brief, meeting (moved ahead of the original date to make it easier for those with other commitments on Tuesday). We had decided over the last couple of meetings which members of the group were going to find/supply the various texts to be used in our investigation, and today we exchanged these so everyone had a copy of each letter.
This means we can now each analyse all of the texts for our given area: Jodie for grammar, Jordyn for pragmatics, Lauren for social context, Meg for lexis and Olivia for Phonology. Once we have each analysed the texts thoroughly in our designated area, we will each write our findings up in the form of an essay ( around 1000 words each).
Deadlines we set ourselves today, and future meetings we have organised:
- Our group will next meet on the 4th of November in the library to draw together a summary of what we have achieved so far and what we hope to achieve in the upcoming weeks. We will then post this on our blog.
- Following this, we will have another group meeting on the 9th November. This is the deadline we have set ourselves to have completed a draft version of our essays by, giving everyone around two weeks to get their piece completed. We then intend to come together to edit and combine our essays to make a single essay to be used in our final presentation. In order to conduct thorough analysis, each member of the group will also find a piece of literature on their given area (and possibly the subject of love letters in general), and we hope to combine and discuss our thoughts about these at this meeting, writing them down to create our literature review.
Problems we have faced this week
- We have experienced some difficulties in obtaining letters from family members far away, meaning it has been more difficult for some group members to get hold of their data than for others. This has been overcome though, with the use of email and phone-calls, so hasn't affected us being able to continue with our work in any way!
- All of our group members have prior arrangements on Wednesday the 24th October, meaning none of us are able to attend the face-to-face session with our module leaders to discuss our progress. Thanks to Jodie who took it upon herself to email the module leaders to arrange an alternative time for us to meet with one of them :)
"A clear and tidy set is a dirst step towards a thorough analysis: once we have a rough idea what is going on, it is much easier to investigate individual issues further."
(Rasinger 2008: 109)
Good to see you're managing to overcome the challenges you're coming across - all good experience (and don't forget it; keep notes so you can write reflectively about what you're learning from all this at a later stage). Sorry no-one can make the drop-in session, but office hours are always an alternative. You mention 'essays': you need to keep notes and report findings, but it's not necessary to write these up as an 'essay' at this stage.
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