Interview with Ruchira Webb

Ruchira is a third-year English literature student. She is from London and is particularly interested in the female voice in nineteenth century literature. 

Ruchira’s top tips:

• Write about what interests you.

• When it comes to reading for essays, know when to stop reading if it’s not relevant.

• Find your angle and keep your argument focussed.

MIEKE: Today I'm joined by Ruchira. Could you please start by telling me what you study and what module this piece was for?

RUCHIRA: I study English literature, and this piece was for the Fin de Siècle module.

MIEKE: Can you tell me what your piece of writing is about and what interested you in this topic or question?

RUCHIRA: I wrote the essay about transformation in national and racial identity and how the vampiric transformation maps onto the fear of reverse colonization.

MIEKE: Was Dracula one of your favorite books on the course, or did you just feel that it was the most suited to this question?

RUCHIRA: I absolutely wanted to write about Dracula already, because it's such an insane text. There's so much going on. So, I already found it really interesting.

MIEKE: How did you go about planning, researching, and drafting your writing?

RUCHIRA: I'm not great at planning usually to be honest. So I went in knowing that I wanted to write about Dracula and then I narrowed it down to the question that I wanted to write about and then I was just thinking about interesting angles into it.   From there, it's basically coming up with a thesis statement and then just reading as much criticism as I could about it so that the essay was in conversation with other scholarship.

MIEKE: Thank you. How do you approach creating a thesis statement? It's obviously important, especially for English essays, and it can be something tricky. So, for our listeners, do you have any tips on doing that?

RUCHIRA: I think it is just about finding something that you are interested in and shaping the question around that interest rather than that question forming what you're writing about. You want it to be something that you genuinely want to be writing about.

MIEKE: And how did you go about breaking this question down so that you could answer it fully? 

RUCHIRA: I think you just have to find a specific angle. Even if the question is quite open-ended, if your argument ends up being vague, then it's easy to go on a tangent. So for me, mine was about reverse colonization and then you can streamline the essay to that.

MIEKE: Were there any books or articles that you found useful in writing this piece?

RUCHIRA: There was the Stephen Arata one and Carol Senf’s piece that, when I was doing the reading, those were the two that everyone's referencing. So, you know those are the key texts that you need to be talking about.

MIEKE: What challenges did you face while writing this essay, and how did you overcome them?

RUCHIRA: I think writing about something like colonisation in a Victorian book, it’s always going to be quite a big topic, so I found it difficult make the essay relevant, to make sure I didn't go off on tangents. Also, because there's so much criticism, some of it, respectfully, some of it isn't very good. You're reading some from the 50s, and you think ‘this feels vaguely racist’, so also weeding out the stuff that isn't relevant and just leaving what is relevant to the argument.

MIEKE: What do you feel that you have gained from writing this essay?

RUCHIRA: I think I am someone who struggles with staying on track for the argument and because this is quite a short essay as well. I think I got better at kind of learning when something was relevant and when I should probably cut that entire section out and just leave it.

MIEKE: Do you think that your editing process was really long or did you edit while you were writing it?

RUCHIRA: I edited while I was going through because I think as you're writing, you want everything to be linking.  So, there were parts where I’d think; this doesn't link very well. This whole section can probably just be scrapped.

MIEKE: And how did you structure your essay in a way that it would make sense and so that it was presentable?  What do you think was successful?

RUCHIRA: I made this big sheet with my thesis statement and things I was going to break it down into and then all the criticism that I thought was helpful. And then from that I came up with distinct sections that flowed into each other. So as long as there's a logical link to the next bit, then you know you can number the paragraphs in order of where they’re meant to go.

MIEKE: Looking back at your second year, what would be your key advice for students in the English department?

RUCHIRA: To write about things that actually interest you because you're going to be doing a lot of reading about it and you'll get sick of it really fast if you're not interested in it.

MIEKE: Do you have any tips for like students in the English department in terms of the amount of reading that they have to do and things like that? Or are you pretty on top of it?

RUCHIRA: I think I tend to read maybe too much, but I think that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think you also have to be able to balance it a bit and learn when to sort of stop reading something that you've been going for like half an hour and it's just not relevant.

MIEKE: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me.

RUCHIRA: Thank you.