We are back this week to continue our Excellence in English Series. This week we have another special piece for you to read and enjoy. The Excellence in English appreciation was first initiated by IULI’s English lecturer who was astonished by the English skills of the students through their classwork, however the idea for an ‘Excellence in English’ group came from our students. The normal English syllabus covers writing and presentation skills, in particular, but a number of students were already proficient in those skills and ready for a bigger challenge. An experiment with one student in early 2019 proved to be successful so a number of students in 2020 took up the challenge of producing either a fiction or non-fiction paper or story.
This week’s piece is by Maganitri Kundala Putri (IBA 2017) and is titled : “Romantic Comedy in Film: The History and Future of Romantic Comedies”.
“I have watched several film analysis video essays on YouTube and have always wanted to delve deep into details of films, their importance, their influence, and their implications. I chose the genre romantic-comedy to analyse simply because I think there are a lot of things that could be said about the genre and it is a genre that I have preconceived opinions about thus, I thought that it would be a lot easier for me to find points of discussion and find throughlines in my writings,” Maganitri explains about her work.
“ The biggest issue I had with the project was simply the fact that I do not watch a lot of, if any, romantic comedies so I had to rely on secondary sources and the analyses of other writers of which I did not as many as I had hoped, especially regarding the history of romantic-comedies in literature. Throughout the project, I did end up watching a few romantic-comedies just to fill in gaps within my knowledge but mostly I used others’ writing and research on top of my own understanding of the topic to overcome the issue”, she adds.
However, overall she was happy with the final result and ended up enjoying the time writing in the end. “But I was rather unmotivated for a large majority of the project as I felt frustrated that I knew what I wanted to write but was unable to expand upon it. As I felt unmotivated, a large portion of the project was rather rushed and I wished I had been able to delve deeper into particular films. I also wished I had picked a genre that I had better knowledge of as I did find it hard to find specific examples and specific points to discuss. Overall, I am happy with what I wrote and it was a fun topic to research, especially the historical portion”.
Please spare some of your time to read Maganitri’s excellent work.