ELT201 Understanding Poetry Tutor-Marked Assignment 02 (TMA02) Question July 2025 | SUSS

ELT201 TMA Submission

It is strongly recommended that you make an early submission to check the originality report and, if necessary, make amendments to your document for resubmission. Note that the Turnitin report is usually generated immediately after the first submission; however, subsequent reports may take up to one day to generate. Do note that Turnitin will not accept any further submissions AFTER the cut-off time. There is a 12-hour grace period after the cut-off time, which is not an extended deadline but solely meant for solving any technical problems that you may encounter while attempting to make a submission before the cut-off time. Please email Canvas Support immediately (with relevant screenshots and your TMA attached) and follow up with Canvas Support first thing in the morning to ensure that the problem is resolved before the grace period is over.

One late submission is allowed only if no prior submissions were made before the cut-off time. Do note that the Canvas system will automatically deduct penalty marks for every day that your assignment is late. With this automatic deduction, there will be no need to request extensions from your tutor because your tutor does not have the mandate to override the Canvas system settings. You will need to form your own judgement as to how many marks you are willing to forego for each extra day that you gain to work on your assignment.

Take care to ensure that you upload the correct TMA document to the correct folder of the correct course. Requests to transfer incorrectly uploaded documents to the correct folder will require an official appeal (and an administrative fee).

Back up your TMA at all times. Once you have uploaded your TMA (in Word document format only), retain the Turnitin digital receipt as evidence of a successful submission. View your submission to ensure that the entire document has been uploaded successfully.

Reminder: When you submit your TMA, please follow the instructions in Canvas and label your file correctly (your name must be in the filename) so that your instructors can upload your essay properly after marking the assignments.

ELT201 Plagiarism and Collusion

The assignment is to be completed on your own. You may discuss the TMA with your course-mates; however, the assignment must be written independently. Do not share your notes, draft, or final TMA with anyone before the marked TMAs are returned to you.

Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material so that you can write up your assignment in your own words. Quotations should be used sparingly. Simply citing the source of ‘copied’ chunks of text does not excuse it from plagiarism. Do ensure that any paraphrasing is done appropriately, even if you use text from your own work that you have submitted as part of another assignment for the same or another course.

The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as your own, or recycling of content from your own earlier marked TMA from the same course or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment that is the same or very similar to another student’s). Both are very serious academic offences. Please refer to the Student Handbook on the penalties for plagiarism or collusion. You are strongly advised to submit your TMA early, check the plagiarism report yourself, and if needed, revise and resubmit your TMA before the submission deadline.

Please ensure that you use the proper citation style both in-text and in your list of references or works cited. The ELT courses require the use of MLA style. 

In particular, for this course, refer to the sections on how to cite poetry and poems.

This assignment is worth 30% of the final mark for ELT201 Understanding Poetry.

The cut-off date for this assignment is Tuesday, 7 October 2025, 11.55 pm.

Note to Students:

You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the TMA, SUSS PI No., Your Name and Submission Date.

Tertiary education aims to hone students’ higher-level competencies such as critical thinking and analytical skills. Hence, students’ submissions must reflect originality and intellectual engagement with the course content. The use of AI tools—including but not limited to ChatGPT, Grammarly, and QuillBot—is strictly prohibited in the preparation of this assignment. This includes using AI to generate, rewrite, or paraphrase content.

Submissions found to contain AI-generated material will be flagged by Turnitin and treated as a breach of academic integrity, which may result in disciplinary action.

Question

Critically analyse and compare the presentation of death in the two poems: Theophilus Kwek’s “Departures” and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s “As a child, I knew nothing about grief” (found on pages 9-10 of this booklet).

Your response must make close reference to the article “Poetry as Research and as Therapy” by Brian E. Wakeman.

Your answer should be a well-structured academic essay that keeps to the word limit of 1,200 words.

Student Notes

1. You should read and evaluate the two poems very carefully. You will need to read the article “Poetry as Research and as Therapy” by Brian E. Wakeman, which is available through JSTOR. You may also want to review and pay close attention to Study Unit 3 in particular, although you should also be considering all other relevant poetic features and devices in your analysis.

2. Your essay must engage with the stipulated journal article by Brian E. Wakeman. The introductory paragraph in your essay should explain your understanding of the overall argument or some of the claims found in the article. However, your discussion of the article should not merely be restricted to the start of your essay, and you must establish a clear and convincing relevance between the article and the meaning of both poems.

3. Your essay should pay close attention to the figurative language found in both poems—how they create meaning and contribute to the presentation of death, but the response should not simply be restricted to analysing this aspect of the poems. Good responses are expected to demonstrate a good understanding of both poems. You should identify the genre and style of each poem and interpret well the effect of various poetic elements.

4. The question requires you to compare the poems. Your discussion should give equal attention to both poems. A dynamic comparison that also incorporates useful elements of the journal article is important.

5. Give a suitable title to your essay, ideally one that indicates your position/response to the statement. Adopt the latest MLA style and format, both in the main body of the paper and in the Works Cited. You will need to cite the article by Wakeman and any other texts cited in your essay. Reminder: plagiarism and collusion are severely penalised.