Essays

I'm so awful with assignments; I enjoy doing the research but approach writing them with utter trepidation. I delay endlessly with the actual writing as suddenly everything, anything, even filing nails seems vitally important and necessary. Until at last I sit down and force myself to concentrate for the required hours. I think its performance anxiety, repeated with every new assignment, as I fear that all of the words chaotically swimming through my mind will fail to find their appropriate place on paper. I think it's the word limit that puts me off as well. I always, always, dread the prospect of not managing to fulfill the required number of words and then of course inevitably find myself having not only fulfilled but exceeded the limit and I'm face with the prospect of cutting it back down to size.

Thankfully the last of this round of assignments is handed in and I have a week or so before they start handing out the next lot - prepared essays for the exams and a history essay that takes the place of an exam. I think the worst of this round was writing my first Stage 3 essay, also my longest at 3000 words, worth a whopping 40% of the paper's assessment and written in a single sitting after a couple of day's research. Again I say, The Island of Dr Moreau is a much underloved text in critical writing! Of course, that's because Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has much greater polysemic potential and the other gothic works of the nineteenth century, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Henry James' Turn of the Screw and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have tended to outshine it.