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Are you left baffled about where to start? This easy-to-use guide walks you through the nuts and bolts of academic writing, helping you develop your essay-writing skills and achieve higher marks. From identifying the essay type and planning a structure, to honing your research skills, managing your time, finding an essay voice, and referencing correctly, this book shows you how to stay on top of each stage of the essay-writing process Includes index Do ever wish that you could write the perfect university essay?
There are no reviews yet. This can be the hardest step of all. In addition, we help you to make notes, both from your sources and for your essay.
One of the worries we can have about writing an academic essay is whether our language is up to scratch. These three chapters provide a quick brush-up in the building blocks of your essay, the sentence and the paragraph, making sure that you can structure them correctly and then punctuate them accurately, so that your meaning is clear.
These four chapters divide your essay into a beginning, a middle and an end. Each has its own special features and here we explain what these are and show you what your tutor is expecting to find. In addition you will probably want to use quotations in your essay. Chapter 14 shows you how to do this, and then finish off the whole product with a nice list of references at the end. Two of these chapters give you tips with the last stage of writing - the one which tends to be rushed.
You can gain extra marks by attention to detail in the polishing and perfecting process and we show you how! Every mistake is an opportunity to learn! The Part of Tens provides you with two chapters listing helpful pointers to keep your essay-writing on track. Ten Tips for Writing Essays in Exams does what it says on the tin. Icons are a handy For Dummies way of catching your attention as you run through a page. Icons come in several flavours, each with its own symbol and terms of reference.
This icon does exactly what it says, highlighting helpful hints to ease your essay writing. Things you should avoid doing like the plague. Ignore this icon at your peril. You can go pretty much where you like from here. For Dummies books are not intended to be cover-to-cover reads, but resources you can dip into as and when you need to. Each chapter is designed to stand alone, delivering the goods on a particular topic. If you really want the lowdown on the whole process, and some ideas on where to go next, you could do a lot worse than read Chapter 1, but never feel that you then have to plod through 2—19 in strict order.
If you want to know more about researching online, check out Chapter 5, for instance. Chapter 16 shows you how to polish the final item.
And so on. Wherever you go in this book, use it to make writing your essays the most enjoyable experience it can be. Essay-writing should always be a challenge: this book helps it not to be a chore. Getting a handle on what an essay title requires of you is often the toughest step of all, so we cover it thoroughly in this part. We also give you practical tips on how to get stuck in to your essay, and take an in-depth look at the different sorts of essay you might be asked to write.
Essays often break down into one of several basic types, so we show you what you should be aiming towards and — above all — help you to get going and keep plugging away. Moving from school- to university-level writing. Getting a feel for writing academically. Breaking the writing process down into stages. Achieving success in your essay writing. Did your teachers at secondary school explain to you what an academic essay is?
You may be someone who writes happily in many situations — for instance you send letters and emails with no hesitation, you have no difficulty keeping a diary or you can write a story from your own imagination.
But an academic essay? This first chapter should go a long way to settling any fears you may have about your writing. We make clear how an academic essay differs from the writing you did at school and from other types of writing you may be familiar with. We break the daunting task of writing your essay into manageable chunks and take you through each stage.
And we give you some tips on how to gain confidence and write successfully. You take notes during lectures and seminars, make notes from books and web pages, take part in online discussions and course blogs, and draft essays and reports — as well as writing your shopping list and texting! Note-taking and blogging are important in that, done well and thoughtfully, they lay the foundations for success in essay writing both in coursework and in exams.
So, given that essays at university count for so much, why do so many students feel ill-prepared for this type of writing? Basically, writing at each main stage of the education process — primary school, secondary school and university — has a different function. By looking at the big picture, you see how what you write and how you write it changes from phase to phase.
Primary school teaches you the rudiments of writing. You develop basic literacy in letters of the alphabet and sentences so that you can read and start to write stories and short compositions. Secondary school assumes that you can use writing to express your ideas and your imagination on paper.
As at secondary school, at university you also have to write essays to show what you know. The depth you go into with a subject is reflected in the enormous, seemingly limitless, amount of reading you have to do. Managing your reading list demands a skill that you may not have developed before university study: critical analysis. With a heightened sense of criticality, you apply frameworks and ideas that experts in the field have developed in order to deepen and extend your knowledge.
The result of the writing process and your background reading is an essay. As such, your essay relies on a solid bibliography. You stand on the shoulders of giants, as Sir Isaac Newton said.
You have to acknowledge all quotations from authors and references to their work according to strict guidelines. See Chapter 14 for details on how to reference correctly. Your tutors push you to analyse to the furthest points until you begin to identify gaps in the body of knowledge. This is the basis of the dissertation you write. People look to you for original thought and comment on your specialist subject. You become an authority. You read just about every book or paper ever published on it.
From undergraduate level onwards, you can lay the foundation for a career in research. Very few become doctors in their subject.
But if you just think for a moment where the undergraduate degree leads, you can see why universities are keen for you to develop your essay-writing skills. The transition to university is a difficult one socially and emotionally, in all probability geographically, and for most people, academically as well. One of the most important things to grasp is the rules of the game you play at university, and a big part of the game is writing essays.
Genres of writing encompass everything from a greeting on a birthday card to an academic essay; in other words, anything you write, by hand or on a keyboard, in any kind of social situation and to anybody under the sun. The academic genre carries a particular writing style that sets it apart from other genres. Turn to Chapter 10 to find out more about how you can adopt this style in your writing.
A kind of formula exists for the way you do the introduction, and similarly for the conclusion. What goes in between the body of the essay can follow several different overall patterns, and is composed of paragraphs that, once again, fit a particular shape. Flick to Chapters 12, 13 and 14 for more on how to write each part of your essay. You should refer constantly to the work of experts rather than going off on a fantasy of your own.
Creativity lies not in flights of imagination but in deep understanding of previous research, and interpreting this in your own way. You may think of this genre as being like a straitjacket, and in a way it is. You play by the rules. In Chapter 16 we take you through the correct way to present your essay. Another type of writing you may have had a try at is journalism. But unless your tutor specifically asks you to write in the style of a tabloid or a quality newspaper for some reason, you need to avoid using features of this genre.
The first area in which these two genres differ is their structure. Less important information can be in paragraphs further down, because not everybody reads this far, and often the article ends without any kind of summing up or conclusion.
Not so the academic essay. And all of it, too. You make sure that every bit of your essay, every paragraph, contains relevant and meaningful comment, thus building up your argument in a logical and structured way.
When you reach the conclusion, you provide some sort of answer to the issue raised in the introduction, and you should to a greater or lesser extent generate a feeling of resolution.
In academic style, on the other hand, you have time to deliberate over sentence structure, often resulting in longer and more complex sentences. Paragraphs consist of several sentences that clearly link together. You can also find in journalism that the language describing an event or a person sometimes appeals to the emotions, because the reporter may be trying to provoke an emotional response in the reader.
The writing may have a subjective slant or be attempting to influence the reader in some way. After all, newspapers do have owners, and these owners do have political leanings. Academic writing, in contrast, attempts always to be objective and has what some may consider a cold and distant tone, because to a large extent it avoids subjectivity. You refer continually to authors through referencing and acknowledging sources. Your tutor looks at the extent to which you use your sources, how many you use and the accuracy with which you use your references.
He or she assesses you on how skilfully you weave your quotations and references into your argument. This is no criticism of journalism, by the way, but a simple statement of fact that the circumstances are different and the features of the genre different as a result. To help you visualise the main differences between essays and journalism, Table summarises points of comparison.
So where do report writing and essay writing differ? Both are written in the same style: objective and very focused. Both refer to the previous work of other researchers and present comment and findings in the light of that body of knowledge. Therefore, you give the same attention to the list of references at the end of a report as at the end of an essay.
Where a report differs from an essay is in the inclusion of some extra features. A report is the product of a piece of research and the different sections of your report correspond to the various stages of that research. It should be easy to spot the sections. Though your tutor may give you instructions that differ in minor details, the usual layout of a report is as follows:.
You give your reader at-a-glance information that conveys the main gist of your report. Table of contents: You provide an overview, with page numbers, of the different sections. Discussion: You interpret your findings in the light of previous research as described in the literature review. Conclusion: You attempt to answer the question raised in the introduction as for an academic essay. The report divides numerically into these sections, and each section begins on a fresh page.
Depending on the nature of the report, you can subdivide the different sections into smaller sections, each with its own subheading. You spread the writing of an essay over a period. In this section, we divide the process into seven distinct stages. As you become more and more comfortable and experienced with the writing process, you develop and gain confidence in your own individual way of working. You may then modify the process to suit your own preferences. Here we provide a framework for you to begin with.
While you do have an excuse but only a little one! To work that out, you unpick:. This is what you did when you were much younger and school was more about being told and memorising facts. The more facts you assembled, the more successful you were. You showed that you had knowledge. Although what you write at university is based on facts or evidence, what you do with this knowledge is what counts now.
Your tutor asks you not simply to describe, but to compare, analyse, discuss and suggest. So you read the books, assemble the facts and then do something with them. Make sure you get your smart literary arguments across concisely and with a compelling introduction and conclusion. Write your essays in record time after getting the basic essay structure down pat. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search.
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