Essay Writing

A Student's Guide

MunLing Shields

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446242612
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Essays in Sociology

Essay Writing is a student guide with a mission: to enable students to write better essays and get the grades they deserve by demystifying the essay-writing process.

MunLing Shields places essay writing within the larger university experience for students. In a clear and easy to understand way the author guides the reader through the process of writing successful university essays by looking at essay writing in the context of academic communication, academic culture and different learning styles and approaches. This book:

• Helps students study more independently and learn more meaningfully to write better essays
• Offers invaluable insights into the way tutors see essays
• Explains why essays are set, and how to understand the rationale behind them
• Demonstrates how best to approach answering the question.

This highly accessible book offers practical, in-depth guidance on each of the stages of the essay writing process - planning, drafting and editing - and relates them to the important sub-skills of information-gathering, reading academic texts, how to get the most out of lectures, referencing and citations, and fluency and appropriateness of style and language. ?An excellent guide for students new to writing essays at university? - David Ellicott, Senior Lecturer in Youth Justice and Youth Studies, Nottingham Trent University

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, quizzes and videos on study success!

1
Learning and Writing
at University

chapter themes

• Academic writing has to communicate.
• Essay writing is a process.
• Learning at university involves more than just knowing facts.
• Assessment, marking criteria and marks reflect expectations.

Chapter 1 gives you an overview of why writing is important at university. Understanding this will put you in a better position to write more effectively as it will provide you with the background you need to make sense of why essays have to be written in a rather prescribed way. Part of this simply involves developing your understanding of what your tutors expect of you, but another very important aspect has to do with the fact that writing seriously about something is also in itself a way of learning about it.

Writing for communication, learning and assessment

Writing is a form of communication, but at university it is also used both to stimulate learning and as a basis on which to assess you. It plays a big part in the mission of the university, which is to develop its students so that they can fulfil their potential and to award qualifications which reflect how far that potential has been fulfilled.

Facts and ideas must go into your writing, but the tutor who reads your essay will already know a lot of these – so what you actually communicate is your interpretation or understanding of the subject. This is what your tutor does not know, and it is what will persuade him or her to give your work a certain mark. At the same time, the discipline of presenting information and ideas in the form of a clear, logical argument will in itself help you to develop a deeper understanding of the issues. That is because it forces you to decide what to include and what to emphasise, how to illustrate what you mean, to make links explicit, and so on. Seeing writing in this way will help you understand why it can be a challenge, but it is also the first step in enabling you to rise to the challenge. It is thus not entirely true to think of reading and listening to lectures as the ‘learning bit’ and writing assignments simply as the way you can show tutors what you have learnt.

One of the most perplexing aspects of writing for students is to be given feedback which tells them that it is not clear what the essay is about. They protest, ‘But it’s perfectly clear to me!’ When you write an essay, it is easy to forget that you are writing both about a topic and for a reader who has certain expectations, so saying, ‘Ah, but what I meant …’ – though understandable – is not acceptable. Your reader, who will usually be your tutor, will never know what you really meant unless this it is the same as what you really wrote.

Your aim in any kind of writing must be to communicate your thoughts and ideas to the intended reader(s). You should remember this even if the reader is yourself – for example, when you are writing a diary or making notes. Have you ever read some of your previous notes or parts of an old diary and had absolutely no idea what you were talking about? If your writing here was clear, you would have understood it without having to rely on your memory.

In order for optimum communication to take place, your writing at university must therefore conform to some shared standards and expectations. University codes and conventions for behaviour determine what is expected in academic writing. Tutors, researchers and students are all expected to share common ground in terms of behaviour, values and attitudes. This commonality is sometimes referred to as ‘academic culture’. To be successful, you must adapt to this and be part of it. For example, universities in the UK will expect a commitment to the following:

• respect for everybody within the culture;
• respect for learning;
• respect for intellectual property;
• fairness;
• equal rights and non-discrimination;
• independent learning.

These values determine much of what is expected in academic writing. Different disciplines may emphasise or minimise different aspects of learning in the culture. For example, different subject areas may have different research traditions: some will be geared towards empirical research and will spend a lot of time doing experiments in laboratories, or working on statistical data collection and analysis. Others will focus on reading and on text and discourse analysis, others on creative output, and so on. However, all academic disciplines will subscribe to the basic principles listed above.

Effective written communication

This section examines the fundamental principles of all effective written communication, starting with a brief consideration of a form of writing we are all familiar with: personal writing.

Personal writing

activity 1.1

Pause for reflection

Write two short messages:

1. An email (or text message) to a close friend and course mate who was with you last night, and whom you have arranged to meet after class;
2. An email to your tutor (with whom you had an appointment).

In both cases you should tell them that you will not be able to meet them today because you have a bad hangover from last night.

Did you produce two identical pieces of writing? It would be very odd if you did! You were writing on the same subject in both cases, but the different readers and purposes made you compose very different messages. Although the reasons for writing may be similar (cancelling an appointment), the purpose of one appointment was social while the other was ‘business’.

This example tells us something of fundamental importance for all written communication. In order to write effectively, we always need to consider the following:

• the audience (who is the intended reader?);
• the purpose (why are you writing?).

In addition, there are two other considerations which will depend on the answers you get to the ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions above, and these are content (the ‘what?’) and organisation (the ‘how?’). These will determine:

• your choice of information and words;
• the grammar and sentence construction;
• the mechanics (spelling, punctuation);
• the style (formal or informal way of writing).

Who? Why? What? How? are the four questions which must to be answered if you want your message to be clear – whatever type of writing you wish to produce. I will refer to these as the ‘four Qs’ in this chapter.

The four Qs in academic writing

We will now examine the four Qs in academic writing, to show how the ‘Who?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’ lead to the ‘How?’

• Who (your reader): Who will read your work? The main reader will be the tutor(s) of the course, who will most likely have had a hand in setting the assignment. The reader will therefore be a person who is knowledgeable about the content matter of the assignment and who has designed the task with certain expectations in mind. This is especially true of the essay. The reflective diary/journal is a tool for developing self-awareness and reflective skills and is usually assessed by both your tutor and yourself.
  Reports may also be read by other interested parties, including your course mates; reviews could be published and read by many in the field; laboratory reports are not only for your tutor, but are also records and evidence of the process and results of work or experiments you have done (especially in psychology and other sciences).
• Why (your purpose): Why do you write at university? The most obvious reason is that you have to! Written assignments are still the most common way to assess what students know and what they can do. You write because you want to get the qualification that proves you have learnt something and can communicate this. Importantly, however, the act of writing is a learning process in itself. When you approach writing critically, you engage in a thinking and learning process which is part of the university tradition. All these are important reasons for writing at university.
  To understand specifically why you have to produce a particular piece of writing you need to understand the learning outcomes of the module (see page 16). Understanding what you achieve when you successfully complete an assignment will give you a sense of satisfaction and purpose. Understanding the language of learning outcomes also means you know why assignments and essays are designed and worded in the ways they are.
• What (the content): The answer to the question of what you write is of course the content and context of your writing. Different types of writing, and even different types of essay, require you to select information in a discriminating and appropriate way. Until you have understood an essay question, you will not know what information is most relevant.
• How (structure and style): How you write refers to the way information is organised or structured and the way or style in which it is put together, and this may vary from one type of writing to another. For example, reports have a clear structure with headings and are written in a specific reporting style. They are very different from essays, which are almost always presented as continuous prose written according to academic conventions (see page 11). All academic writing is formally structured in a recognisable style, and this must be consistent and appropriate for the particular type of writing. Nevertheless, each type of writing must comply with the academic standards set by most courses, which require a more or less formal style as well as accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation.
  This academic style can be confusing to students as it can differ quite radically between different types of writing (for example, a formal essay and a reflective diary entry). Indeed, you may well need to write in more than one style within one piece of work (as when nursing students, for instance, have to reflect on practice and relate theory to practice in the same essay). To make it even more difficult, different subjects or even tutors may or may not accept stylistic variations. When in doubt, ask your tutor and look at examples of good practice.

As you can see, the question of How is very much determined by the Who, Why and What. Although you may think you only want to know about the How of writing essays, you cannot really gain a full understanding of that until you have some answers to the first three questions.

While this book covers one particular type of writing – the essay – the basic principles set out here can be applied t...