Writing your perspectives submission
The structure that covers the standard
- Your teacher sets the format — a report, a presentation, structured answers. The standard sets what has to be in it.
- A structure that works in any format:
- The event and why it produced disagreement — short. Two or three sentences of context, and the decision or dispute at its centre.
- Perspective one — all five parts, evidenced.
- Perspective two — all five parts, evidenced.
- The comparison — one section, about both at once. This is where Excellence lives.
- A short conclusion — what the disagreement was actually about.
- Give the comparison its own heading. A comparison folded into a conclusion arrives with no words left to evidence it.
Writing a perspective section
- Open with the position, in one sentence, attributed. A ratepayer writing to the Waipuna Herald in April 1906 held that...
- Give the stated reason next, quoted short. Three to eight words inside your own sentence.
- Then the action, because it is the best-evidenced part. What they did, when, and how you know.
- Then attitudes and beliefs, as inferences, labelled. His argument implies... rather than he believed...
- Close on what they did not argue, if something was available and unused. That sentence is usually the most interesting one in the section.
- Five to eight sentences per perspective is a working length for a written submission. Depth comes from evidence and precision, not from paragraphs.
Quoting and attributing
- Quote short and quote inside your own sentences. Long block quotations do the work you are being assessed on.
- Attribute at the point of use. The council minute of 14 June 1938 records..., the handbill issued by Renwick's committee argued...
- Attribute inferences differently from evidence. The source shows for what is stated; this suggests or his argument implies for what you have worked out. Mixing the two is the commonest accuracy failure in this standard, because it presents a reading as a record.
- Reference so it can be checked — the source, its date, and where it is held or published.
Avoiding the two failures that cap this standard
- Failure one: the opinion list. Positions with no reasons and no actions. Repair: for each perspective, write the reason in the person's own words and the action from a record.
- Failure two: the present-day verdict. This was wrong or this was prejudiced. Repair: replace the verdict with what the person believed they were protecting, and what they had at stake.
- Both failures come from the same place — treating a perspective as a moral position rather than as a historical one.
- You may state a moral judgement in one sentence if you want to. What does not work is substituting it for the explanation, because a judgement describes a position and never explains it.
Reaching Excellence
- The comparison paragraph is not optional. Which is better evidenced, which is more representative, and what accounts for the difference.
- Name the kind of disagreement — facts, meaning, or what should follow. Most look factual and are about meaning.
- Say what both sides shared, and what neither argued. This is the most original thing available, because it appears in no source.
- Say what you could not establish. I have no source for what Renwick herself thought, only for what her committee published. Precision about scope makes the rest credible.
- Significant supporting evidence means substantial evidence per perspective, not in total. Check by perspective, not by bibliography.
Worked Example
Worked example
Two versions of the same perspective section, on the Waipuna borough dispute (invented).
Version A
Version B — rewrite it.
Answer:
Step 1 — diagnose. Many ratepayers is unattributed and unevidenced. They believed is a claim about minds with no source. There is no stated reason, no action, and the closing sentence is a present-day verdict that ends the analysis. Four of the five parts are missing.
Step 2 — attribute and give the position.
Step 3 — the stated reason, quoted short.
Step 4 — the action, because it is the most certain part.
Step 5 — attitudes and beliefs, labelled as inference.
Step 6 — replace the verdict with the observation.
Same perspective. Version B attributes it to a source with a date, gives the stated reason in the writer's own words, evidences the action, marks every inference as an inference, and replaces the present-day verdict with an observation about which argument he chose and what that implies about Waipuna.