What does the written Major Work proposal have to establish, and how do you defend your concept, scope and form aloud in the Viva Voce so that the project is approved and set up to succeed?
Students prepare a written proposal for the Major Work and present and defend it in a Viva Voce, articulating the concept, scope, emphases and chosen form and their relationship to prior Stage 6 English study
A guide to the early-process checkpoint where you pitch the Major Work. What the written proposal must cover, how the Viva Voce works as a defence of concept, scope and form, and how to turn a fifteen-minute conversation into a sharper project.
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What this dot point is asking
Before you are allowed to spend a year on a Major Work, you have to convince someone it is worth doing. That happens through a written proposal and a spoken defence of it called the Viva Voce. Students tend to treat this as a hurdle to clear and forget, but the proposal stage is the first formal test of whether your concept, scope and form hold together. This dot point asks you to pitch the project precisely enough that a teacher can approve it, and to defend the thinking behind it aloud without notes to lean on.
The answer
The written proposal sets out what you intend to compose, the concept it explores, its scope and emphases, and the form you have chosen. The Viva Voce is the conversation in which you present that proposal and answer questions about it, demonstrating that the project is genuinely yours and genuinely viable.
What the written proposal must establish
A proposal is not a vague statement of interest. It needs to name the concept as a contestable idea, define the scope so the project is neither thin nor unmanageable, identify the emphases that matter most, and commit to a form chosen because it serves the concept. A proposal that says "I want to write about identity" has not yet done any of this work. One that says it will compose a suite of poems exploring how a bilingual speaker code-switches under emotional pressure has named concept, scope and form in a single breath.
The Viva Voce as a defence
The Viva Voce gives you the chance to present the major concepts, scope, emphases and form of your proposed work, and to explain how the project draws on the knowledge, understanding and skills of your Advanced and Extension courses. The allocation is roughly fifteen to twenty minutes, often with preparation time on supplied questions beforehand. It is a defence in the academic sense: you are not reciting the proposal, you are answering for it.
Why the defence is useful, not just a hurdle
The questions a teacher asks in the Viva Voce are usually the questions a marker would ask of the finished work. If you cannot answer why this form, why this scope, or why this concept now, you have found a weakness while there is still time to fix it. Treat hard questions as a gift. A proposal that survives genuine interrogation is a proposal worth a year of work.
Preparing for the conversation
Rehearse answers to the predictable questions: why this concept, why this form, what is the scope, how does it extend your prior study, what will the finished work look like. Bring the journal so you can point to evidence of investigation already underway. Speak as the author of the project, not a student reporting on it. The register is confident and specific, not defensive.
After the Viva Voce
The proposal is not a contract written in stone. Concepts refine as you read and draft, and a project that looks identical in October to its proposal in March has probably not investigated deeply enough. But the proposal gives you a reference point. When you later wonder whether a change of direction is growth or drift, the original proposal and the questions raised in the Viva Voce tell you what the project was meant to be.
A strong proposal and a confident Viva Voce do more than secure approval. They force you to articulate the concept, scope and form early, expose weaknesses while they are cheap to fix, and tie the project explicitly to your prior English study. Treat the defence as the first serious draft of the thinking that your Reflection Statement will later have to prove.