Ultimate EPQ thread

by the way, does the title need to be a question; I was thinking of doing 'A musical response to....'

Nope. Mine was 'A critique of current though in...'

1. How far has the presentation of women in Victorian literature been positive and negative? (May need to re-word)

2. Something about Anglo-Saxon Literature but I can't think of a specific question. I think I'd like to do this one the most because it's on a lot of uni courses and I'm genuinely interested in it, but it's quite narrow and 'too specialist' for the libraries that I've been to.

3. Something about Irish Literature - also of interest but quite narrow as far as I know.

If you think you'll enjoy #2 most, then I'd definitely go for that. Also sounds the most interesting to me; I've known people cover women in Victorian literature and also Irish literature (well, James Joyce, anyway) in English lit coursework, but never Anglo-Saxon literature. If your school runs EPQ in a fashion at all similar to the way mine did then you'll need to be doing something you really enjoy to stop you braining yourself with a copy of Beowulf in a couple of months

You don't need to think of a specific question right away (in fact it helps if you don't) but you'll need a vague idea of what area of A-S literature you'd like to cover - you could decide to look at Christian Old English poetry and then narrow your question down to "To what extent does the religious authorship of some A-S literature affect its presentation of x/y", for example. You could then decide which authors you like the most and narrow this down further to just look at Caedmon and Cynewulf - AQA seem to like you making your title progressively narrower. (I don't know much about it, so those are just examples.)

If it's difficult but still do-able to get hold of the sources etc. you'll need for #2 then that's another point in its favour - writing about difficulties you had in obtaining materials and how you adjusted the project to cope with them is worth marks.

Mine was on philosophy, not literature, so just my two cents there!

Thank you, much appreciated. I got Beowulf out the library a few days ago actually!
I was also contemplating doing mine on a Philosophical question, but Lit is the way!

Hi
Could my title be anything, even something simple like;
The causes of the financial crisis of 2008?

or does it need to be more focused like;
what was Wall st's role in causing the financial crisis?

As afterall aslong as you evaluate, manage and plan the project well and have a great final evaluation then thats pretty much an A.

Does every one agree that its an Easy A grade compared to sitting exams for an AS-level?

Thanks

I'm worried I haven't done enough research -most of the stuff I've used is online which people tend to look down their noses at.

Do they? As long as it's from somewhere with a reasonable provenance and you cite it properly I don't see why it shouldn't be considered valid If there aren't any suitable or available books on the topic it seems unreasonable to expect you to try and include them!

My supervisor said she wanted to see a bit of variation in the formats of our sources but I think a lot of people had bibliographies which were largely comprised of web pages. You could do a source analysis appendix and explain why you felt those sources were valid despite being online?

Good point, I think I may have to do that. The trouble is for my topic there are so many books, and I can't afford to buy them all and my local libraries don't even bother to stock them, despite this being a borough that borders the Docklands and has benefitted greatly from its prosperity.