Reflection on the Paper 1 Assessment

Paper 1 Assessment:

 A Commentary Analysis on 'How to go from girl-friend to girlfriend"

- Before I received the feedback, I was a bit apprehensive about the assessment as I believed that I hadn't performed to my best abilities. This is because I spent a lot of time annotating the actual text and writing out a general framework before commencing with the actual commentary. While this gave me lots of time to discover stylistic devices, underlying themes and context and understand the author's use of language, I did not have enough time for the actual assessment. I felt that the last few paragraphs were very rushed, and I had to skip out on a lot of features/techniques just because I did not have time to explain them.

- I became more confident with my work after the feedback and the assessment because I did perform better than I expected and I received a lot of useful feedback in areas that I personally also felt I needed to improve. Going over the commentary again, I feel like I did well for the first half and it was structured well, but the remaining half it was a bit too brief without much explanation. I am overall glad with my performance and intend to use the feedback to improve further.

- For next time, I want to elaborate more on the context, and if I can, I will try to mention all of them (the historical, social and cultural context) instead of just one. Furthermore, I also felt that my explanation for the use of stylistic devices should be improved because although I can recognize them and can briefly mention their effect, I want to be able to clearly explain their effects on the reader (rather than just say, 'it emphasizes the issue') and how it helps with the author's aim and purpose.