Custom essay writing : an exploration

In late 2010, three things happened. Firstly, I graded the final submission of a student who had, to date, been producing work that was, on the whole, pass/credit standard. Their last essay was outstanding. It was well organised, cleverly argued, well referenced and enjoyable to read. Turnitin assured me that the paper was not plagiarised but I remained suspicious because it seemed ‘too good to be true’. In the end, I gave it 91/100. Later in the same year, the final two events happened. I discovered that a large scale essay writing service provider from the USA was opening a ‘branch’ in Australia. Finally, a colleague from the States told me how she had become enraged to see a custom writing essay provider as a (busy) stallholder at her orientation week market day. She was furious, surely this is illegal? Interested in finding out ‘what (if anything) this might mean to Deakin?’, Toija and I approached Teaching and Learning in our faculty to see if they might fund a small experiment. They did, and the presentation will contain a record of this exploratory project. This project had a very simple premise. What would we receive if we ordered a custom written essay for one of the ALC101 assignment questions? Would it pass?

Embedding academic skills development in course delivery

Innovative approaches need to be adopted to meet the challenge of ensuring that graduates at the end of their course of study are not only strong in their discipline, but also have the required generic skills to give them a good standing within their selected professions. This paper reports on a study that examined how well academic skills are embedded into the undergraduate Environmental Science curriculum at Deakin University in Australia. It reports on students’ self evaluation of their essay writing skills, and a case study that involves a discipline specialist working with an academic skills advisor to enhance student generic skills. It discusses the patchy nature of current implementation of programs for generic skill education.

Putting the cog into cognitive : the theory behind teaching practice.

During teacher education programs, lecturers introduce students to the joys of studying a range of theorists. Sadly, many teachers appear to put theoretical perspectives of practice behind them immediately the essay-writing is over. The purpose of this paper is to breathe life into the work of theorist, relevant to early childhood teaching. I aim to inspire teachers to gain a new depth of satisfaction from their teaching as they critically reflect on their practice and gain a deeper understanding of teaching strategies that support children’s learning and development.

Rope dancer : a novel and accompanying essay

The thesis combines a novel and a critical essay. The novel tells of a group of people in Melbourne, some of whom write, party, have sex, take drugs, go climbing and die. The essay discusses four aspects of the novel: climbing fiction, Nietzsche in literature, place and fiction and character as hero.

Representation and judgement : 'privileged' Jews in Holocaust writing and film

This thesis analyses the ways in which moral judgements of so-called privileged Jews are constructed in Holocaust representations. ‘Privileged’ Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have often been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood and hastily judged facet of the Holocaust. Scholars have neglected the problem of judgement in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews; nonetheless, Holocaust texts frequently portray these liminal figures.

Of crucial importance to the thesis is Primo Levi’s paradigmatic essay entitled ‘The Grey Zone,’ which directly engages with the complex and sensitive issue of ‘privileged’ Jews. Levi argues that due to the extreme ethical dilemmas that ‘privileged’ Jews confronted, any judgement of these victims needs to be suspended. However, if, as Levi suggests, judgement is at times impossible, the thesis challenges Levi’s assumption by contending that representations of ‘privileged’ Jews inevitably take a moral position. In this way, the thesis conceptualises judgement as a ‘limit’ of representation. Indeed, it is shown that Levi himself cannot abstain from judging those for whom he argues judgement should be suspended.

The thesis takes Levi’s concept of the ‘grey zone’ as a point of departure in order to examine the problems of judgement and representation in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews. Analysis focuses on Raul Hilberg’s influential historical work and examples of documentary and fiction films. The thesis examines how Hilberg and several filmmakers employ conventions as a means of conveying judgement. It is argued that self-reflexive representations of ‘privileged’ Jews in film, particularly fictional dramatisation, have the potential to provide a nuanced representation of ‘privileged’ Jews, which engages with Levi’s ideas by questioning the possibility of judgement.

Writing/reading a life : the rhetorical practice of autobiography

This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and autobiographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the catalyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of language in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the instability of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography.

Clarifying creative nonfiction through the personal essay

In a recent issue of TEXT, Matthew Ricketson sought to clarify the ‘boundaries between fiction and nonfiction’. In his capacity as a teacher of the creative nonfiction form he writes, ‘I have lost count of the number of times, in classes and in submitted work, that students have described a piece of nonfiction as a novel’. The confusion thus highlighted is not restricted to Ricketson’s journalism students. In our own university’s creative writing cohort, students also struggle with difficulties in melding the research methodology of the journalist with the language and form of creative writing required to produce nonfiction stories for a 21st century readership.
Currently in Australia creative nonfiction is enthusiastically embraced by publishers and teaching institutions. Works of memoir proliferate in the lists of mainstream publishers, as do anthologies of the essay form. During a time of increasing competition and desire for differentiation between institutions, when graduate outcomes form a basis for marketing university degrees, it is hardly surprising that, increasingly, tertiary writing teachers focus on this genre in their writing programs.
A second tension has arisen in higher education more generally, which affects our writing students’ approaches to tertiary study. The student writers of the 21st century emerge from a digitally literate and socially collaborative generation: the NetGen(eration). From a learner-centric viewpoint, they could be described as time-poor, and motivated by work-integrated learning with its perceived close links to workplace contexts and to writing genres. They seek just-in-time learning to meet their immediate employment needs, which inhibits the development of their capacity to adapt their researching and writing to various genres and audiences.
This article examines issues related to moving these NetGen student writers into the demanding and rapidly expanding creative nonfiction market. It is form rather than genre that denotes creative nonfiction and, we argue, it is the unique features of the personal essay, based as it is on doubt, discovery and the writer’s personal voice that can be instrumental in teaching creative nonfiction writing to our digitally and socially literate cohort of students.

"Kind of, In Kind: The Politics of Circulating Feelings in the Writing of Juliana Spahr"

Through the life-writing of American poet Juliana Spahr, this essay investigates not only how the lyric is being used by contemporary poets to represent compound feelings but also what relationship affect might have to the political. It considers how Spahr constructs a porous subjectivity that circulates through a system that is simultaneously social, biological, and textual in its environment. Spahr demonstrates how the continually changing relation of self to place and other may lead to a confusion and complexity of feeling. In particular, it focuses on the nested or interrelated nature of what Sianne Ngai has termed ‘ugly feelings’, particularly in terms of sexuality, colonialism, and globalisation. It is argued that Spahr’s poetic navigation of such feeling seeks to locate possibilities for cultural adaptation and transformation.

Writer-as-narrator: engaging the debate around the (un)reliable narrator in memoir and the personal essay

Subjective and personal forms of nonfiction writing are enjoying exponential popularity in English language publishing currently, as an interested public engages with ‘true’ stories of society and culture. Yet a paradox exists at the centre of this form of writing. As readers, we want to know who the writer is and what she has to tell us. Yet as writers we use a persona, a constructed character, a narrator who is only partially the writer, to deliver the narrative. How is a writer able to convey ‘true’ stories that are inherently reliant on memory, within a constructed narrative persona?We find a ‘gap’ between the writer and the narrator/protagonist on the page, an empowered creative space in which composition occurs, facilitating a balance between the facts and lived experiences from which ‘true’ stories are crafted, and the acknowledged fallibility of human memory. While the gap between writer and writer-as-narrator provides an enabling space for creative composition, it also creates space for the perception of unreliability. The width of this gap, we argue, is crucial. Only if the gap is small, if writer and writer-as-narrator share a set of passionately held values, can the writer-as-narrator become a believable entity, satisfying the reader with the ‘truth’ of their story.

Relocating the personal : a critical writing pedagogy

Addressing the current and growing interest in the personal, the self, and the autobiographical not only in the teaching of writing, but also across many disciplinary and subject fields, Relocating the Personal describes a rich array of practical approaches to teaching the personal in settings where it has been excluded." "The author argues for the teaching of writing as a political project in schools and communities, and for a notion of the personal which is not simply equated with voice. The construct of narrative is preferred, because it allows teachers to examine all personal writing as a representation and not the same thing as the writer's life. Strategies are developed for examining how experience is portrayed and how it might be written differently, with material effects on both the personal text and the writer's person.

The book incorporates the latest theories of critical and genre literacy as it develops four teaching cases in different education contexts (secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and adult/community).