Dr Sophie Marnette, Balliol College

Sophie.marnette@balliol.ox.ac.uk

 
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WHAT TO DO FOR YOUR TUTORIALS

 

Organising for Tutorials

Please make sure that your college tutor contacts the Medieval French team before the term begins. Our teaching is organized centrally and we will be in touch with you to explain how the papers work, how you can prepare, and where you can find information (list of essay topics and suggested readings are available on Canvas).

If you are in your second year, you can either choose to have 4 tutorials this year and 4 tutorials in your final year. Or you can take 8 tutorials during your second year, with one or two revisions sessions in your final year

If you are in your final year and need 8 tutorials, it is better if they take place every fortnight during two terms. Extra revision tutorials will be available in Trinity Term.

 

Handing the essay in

For medieval literature tutorials, I typically ask students to read or summarise their essays during tutorials. Please bring me one copy so that I can follow the reading. I will keep it, correct it and hand it back later with comments on the style and structure of the essay. Comments on the content take place during tutorials.

 

Tutorial

We will meet in my office, 3.11 Balliol College.

Make sure to "prepare" for your supervision:

Keep at least one extra copy of your essay and bring it with you for the supervision.

Re-read your essay before the supervision and be ready to give a short oral summary of what you wrote.

 

References : where to find them and how to use them

On canvas, you will find specific reading lists for each medieval literature topic, with suggested essay titles at the end. You must read more than one of the works recommended and you should indicate which works you have used in a bibliography, at the end of your essay.

Several of the references given on canvas are to articles available for downloading (see “Online Article Collection”).

Do read books too! They will often give you a broader view of the topic, which - while not always immediately relevant for the specific essay title you picked - will help you with your global understanding of the topic for the exam.

Although making photocopies or printing scanned articles is undoubtedly expensive, it might be very beneficial in the long run, especially if you are in your second year and need to revise all these topics in two years from now... Then you might have forgotten almost everything... except if you have good handouts and notes from lectures, corrected essays (re-read and annotated after the tutorial) and specific articles, books chapters on hand because by then you might have no time to go to the library ...

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