Choosing a Course

There can be huge differences between the various choices of department on your UCAS form, if you're not careful. So look carefully at the prospectus for each of your selections. What you learn and how you learn it can be vastly different things in each institution, so think carefully.

The easy option is often to pick the course with the more contemporary feel - the idea that Hemingway is an easier read than Chaucer. For one thing that may lead you to apply for vastly over-subscribed courses, as others think the same. And for another, do you really want to be ploughing the same literary furrow for another three or four years? This is your chance to expand your mind, so with all that choice out there, you'd be mad to waste it.

Tread carefully through course titles too. Similar sounding course titles can have very different content, but, generally, you can assume that English language and English literature are quite separate fields of study.

English language looks at syntax, the development of the language from its Old English origins, and how and why it is manipulated by writers. English literature takes literary texts as its main focus, studies their forms and nodes, often in relation to literary periods or movements, and studies them in broader contexts, such as social history; philosophy and politics.

English studies is different again: it adopts a more socio-cultural perspective, and also often uses a broader approach - more theoretical, perhaps involving literature in translation ("literary studies" is also used for this), or an emphasis on modern/contemporary literature.

To confuse matters further, you can take modules in both.

So choose carefully, and check too the institution itself. Does it have a good library? (If not, does the town have good bookshops, especially second-hand ones?) Do you recognise the names of those who will teach you from criticism you have read? (And, if not, is that your fault or theirs?) What about the specialisations on offer?

And don't forget to check the assessment. You will usually have to sit some exams, and most English programmes are assessed through a mixture of coursework and examination. Many universities will let you write a dissertation of around 10,000 words in the final term or semester.

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