Group 2 – Review for a school online library

As a part of the workshop activity, our group produced a review of a memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, written by the English writer Jeanette Winterson and published in 2011.

Our review is intended to be inserted into an online school library, as a future reference for students who will read and study the novel. In our working process, we started re-reading the novel, focusing our attention on the way the story was told and elements were organized in the text. Intertextuality was another important part of the analysis, since we found different similarities between Jeanette Winterson’s description of the industrial city of Manchester, her home town, and other texts we read in our module, about the Industrial Revolution. After the first drafting of the review, we had it read by some of our schoolmates, as a peer-proof reading, and, following theirs and our teacher’s advices we finally arrived to the final version of the product.

Of course, our teacher had an important role as a supervisor, helping us and advising us; she spurred us to unleash our creativity too, in order to make us work in an independent way.

We think this activity really helped us to improve our writing skills, but it also taught us to compare texts on the same topic, isolating the writer’s opinions from facts. Moreover, we learnt about the elements of a memoir as a literary genre and we became more aware of the contradictory effects brought by the Industrial Revolution, a process that still influences the contemporary world.

We also consider the workshop an important moment to mature as future citizens and learn how to work together, a skill which will be more and more important in the future.