Get Great Marks for Your Essays, Reports, and Presentations

John Germov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000257250
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

Not sure how to begin writing? Four assignments and only four weeks to go before the deadline? Then this book is for you.Find out the rules of the essay-writing game: how to muckrake for information, write drafts, handle references, and do analysis. Discover where you win and lose marks. Learn how to take the right short cuts and make the most of your time. Get Great Marks for Your Essays, Reports, and Presentations tells you all you need to know to write successful essays and reports, and create attention-grabbing presentations in the social sciences and humanities.This third edition is fully revised in response to readers' suggestions and includes extensive coverage of online resources, tips for getting the best from your computer tools, and guidance on how to pitch to your audience.'This guide is great. I had a lot of trouble passing my essays. After reading this book I found I wasn't alone. This book has helped me to understand how to improve my writing. It's easy to read and it's pretty cool too!' - Student comment

1
First things first: Being an academic detective

• ► What can you learn by writing essays?
• ► How much time and effort should you invest in writing an essay?
• ► What are the benefits and hazards of working in groups?

Your essay is almost due and all you have is an essay topic and a few brief instructions. If you are lucky, you may have had a tutorial on some basic essay techniques. No one has really told you what is expected, how you lose and gain marks, or how much effort or time you are expected to put in. This chapter will help to clarify all of these matters.

Into the great unknown: What is an essay?

Students are often ill-prepared for writing tertiary-level essays, and experience a great shock when their first essay is returned with a lower than expected mark. There is a jump in the standard of work required when you move from secondary school to a tertiary institution. Often because of a jam-packed curriculum, few teachers spend much time telling their students what is expected of them and how to go about meeting those expectations. Students are assumed to already have essay skills or to be able to acquire them miraculously in a very short time. This section of the book presents a way for you to acquire these skills, but remember that hard work and plenty of practice are needed for you to master them.

The tertiary essay differs from what you may have written in secondary school in a number of ways:

• You are expected to read widely and to critically review the field of literature pertaining to your topic. Relying on a single book is unacceptable.
• You are expected to write analytical essays that attempt to explain issues.
• You are expected to present evidence to support what you say.
• You are expected to source the content of your essay by using a referencing system that shows where you got the information.
• You cannot rely on summary, but must discuss the topic in a manner that shows real insight into the subject-matter.

Essays are not easy assessment tasks, but they are one of the few tasks that allow you significant control over the way you organise, research, and answer the assessment question. At the undergraduate level, an essay is usually not based on original research; you are not expected to solve the world’s problems in 2000 words, especially not when numerous books have been written on the topic already. Essays are a document of your learning; they show proof of your understanding of the topic and your ability to communicate that understanding convincingly. The tertiary essay is based on the following skills:

• independent thinking—meaning no one tells you what to do or what to write
• finding, selecting, organising, and referencing information
• analysing information from competing explanations and sources, and making a persuasive argument or thesis
• answering a question in a given timeframe and within a set word limit.

Essay-writing skills will serve you well beyond the walls of the education system. Contrary to popular belief, essays are not some form of perverse initiation ritual designed to make life hard for students. Many jobs require you to write letters, memos, information sheets, and reports—all of which, to a greater or lesser degree, require skills in research, analysis, writing, and referencing. The tertiary essay is therefore the training ground for future life and employment skills. It is a tool for communicating your knowledge and your understanding. Most importantly, essay writing teaches you to analyse a topic systematically and to communicate your ‘thinking’ about the topic in a logical way. No matter what job you may get in the future, your employer will appreciate your ability to express yourself effectively in writing as well as in speech. The ability to sustain a coherent, well-supported, and well-informed argument is a quality that employers appreciate highly.

Essays as detective work

You see, but you do not observe.

—Arthur Conan Doyle

Essays involve a lot of detective work. Think of yourself as an academic detective who has to solve the puzzle of the essay topic that confronts you. Your task is to find the relevant facts, motives, and logical explanations of the topic under investigation. In your quest for understanding, you have to put aside any personal views you may have about a topic and leave no stones unturned. In the course of your investigation of an essay topic, you will uncover much information and often-conflicting explanations or theories. In fact, you need to make sure that you know all that contradicts your stance so that you may argue convincingly against it. Being an academic detective means that you look upon the evidence gathered with a critical eye and accept nothing on blind faith. To ensure that you take nothing for granted and properly evaluate the information you uncover, do as Sherlock Holmes would do, and keep the following questions in mind:

• Is the information you have found relevant to the topic?
• Is your information up to date?
• Do you have supporting evidence for any claims made?
• What explanations support the evidence collected?
• Do alternative or conflicting explanations and evidence exist?

The academic detective

The work of an academic detective is something you learn by doing, but you can also learn basic skills and tips from those who have gone before you. Let this book be your guide to the secret methods of the academic detective; let it help you in your investigation by clarifying how to find, analyse, and organise the information you need to answer an essay question.

Time management

The first mistake you can make is to dive headlong into an essay topic before you have a clear idea of what is involved. An essay is not something you can make up as you go along. Planning and research are everything: if you do not get this part right, the rest of the essay will fail to fall into place, and you will be left confused and panicked as the due date approaches.

Let us start with a few basic time-management hints. The first thing you need to do is make a list of the due dates of all of your assignments, as shown in Figure 1.1. Just putting the due date in your diary, computer’s calendar function, or smart phone may not give you enough warning unless you constantly flip through your diary ahead of time. The last thing you would want as you turn to the next page in your diary or check your smart phone calendar is to see that something is due the following day. Figure 1.1 shows a fictional list of work due. As this example shows, assessment due dates for different subjects often occur around similar times, and sometimes even on the same day. Submitting a number of tasks in the same time period is part of student life. Therefore, it is important that you develop an effective system of time management, especially for essay writing. You should allow a few weeks to work on each essay, on and off. By giving yourself plenty of time, you avoid the mad rush for library books in the two weeks prior to the due date, and are therefore more likely to get the sources of information you want. It will also give you time to consult your tutor if necessary, and allow for a few drafts of your essay before you submit the final version.

Figure 1.1 Plan for your assessment due dates

How much time, how much effort?

Students are often unclear about how much time and effort they should put into an essay. The actual figure will vary according to the discipline and the nature of the task, but a ballpark figure for an essay of 2000 words at first-year tertiary level would be between 20 and 40 hours of work. Don’t panic: that time includes research, reading, and note taking, as well as producing essay drafts and the final version for submission. Use this figure as a guide: it is a minimum. Ask your lecturers or tutors how much time they expect you to take to complete the task, as some may require you to do much more than others.

There are a number of other reasons why essays take time to write. You are expected to consult a variety of written sources so as to become acquainted with information, research, theories, and criticisms; and to appraise the collected material: what is relevant or irrelevant, supported or unsupported, tentative or conclusive? All of this takes time. Furthermore, writing is a skill that improves with practice. By writing a few drafts, you will find that your expression and essay structure become clearer and more concise each time. You should allow enough time to produce at least three drafts of your essay. Handy Hint 1 provides some further time-saving advice.

Handy Hint 1: Organise your notes and enhance your learning

A subject folder

It is useful to have a subject folder for each subject so that you can keep all of your lecture, tutorial, and reading notes in the one place. A well-organised subject folder will help you to get started on your assignments and is especially useful for exam preparation.

An index of keywords

Consider keeping an alphabetically indexed section of definitions of keywords, which you can update regularly, at the front or back of your subject folder. You will thank yourself later. If this sounds like too much work, an alternative is to highlight keywords in your notes by either making a margin note or using a highlighter pen.

Summaries and critical reflection in your own words

As part of your subject folder, you should aim to summarise your weekly learning regularly, using your own words. By doing this, particularly through the act of interpreting the material in your own words, you will enhance your learning and improve your memory. Use the following points as a guide:

• Briefly summarise the lecture topic, tutorial, or reading for the week.
• Critically reflect on your study by briefly recording your thoughts and reactions. What was one important thing you learned? What did you like most about what you learned? What did you like least? Why?

Producing regular summaries and critically reflecting upon them helps to clarify and reinforce your learning. Recording your thinking and reactions in this way also helps you to remember what you have studied.

Together alone: The benefits and hazards of group work

There are two ways in which you may become involved with group work: voluntary and involuntary.

Voluntary group work usually takes the form of a study group (or a study partner), in which you choose to study collaboratively with other students, and meet as needed. Working together with fellow students has a number of benefits, such as helping one another to understand subject content, developing ideas for assignments, and giving each other feedback on drafts of written work before submission. Such collaborative work is a perfectly acceptable practice. Importantly, in situations where you are required to submit individual pieces of work, you must be careful not to copy others’ work, or to produce work that is overly similar to that of others, as this will result in a fail grade for that piece of work since academic integrity has not been upheld.

Involuntary group work refers to situations when working in teams is a requirement of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Handy Hints
• Preface to the third edition
• Introduction: What this book can do for you
• 1 First things first: Being an academic detective
• 2 The rules of the essay-writing game
• 3 We need a plan With Lauren Williams
• 4 The art of analysis
• 5 Finding what you need
• 6 Untangling the web: Beyond Google and Wikipedia
• 7 Making sense of it all: Effective reading and note taking
• 8 Doing essay drafts
• 9 Easy marks: The unwritten rules of academic writing
• 10 Write it right: Handling the nitty-gritty
• 11 Writing reports and abstracts
• 12 Book and article reviews
• 13 The essay exam
• 14 Writing and delivering stress-free presentations
• 15 Referencing demystified
• 16 The end … or just the beginning?
• Appendix: Glossary of Latin phrases and abbreviations