academic writing

Essay Writing Hints: Signposting

Take a look at the following passage. It demonstrates what happens when you ignore the importance of signposting:-

Professor Jo Carter is a renowned expert on forensic science, however, she is better known for her crime writing mysteries. She first began writing in the ‘Whodunnit?’ genre when she was studying for her PhD, but it wasn’t until her fourth novel, and the introduction of the popular Chief Inspector Matthius that she sprang to fame.

Most common essay writing mistakes!

This mistake is the one you want to avoid above all others, and making this error can cost you your place at university. Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as if it is your own. The universities see it as stealing. Unfortunately, with the rise of cut-and-paste technology, this is becoming more common and the sad thing is that most people who plagiarise didn’t mean to do it. But this is not seen as a defence. Be very careful to put everything in your own words.

Essay writing preparation: the website critique

Using web pages as research resources is now common practice within academia, from undergraduate level right up to PhD, but although there are many reliable sources on the internet, there are some websites that provide inaccurate information. When you are basing an academic argument on a web page, you want to be sure that it provides reliable evidence.

Types of Essay: Writing a Book Review

As part of a postgraduate degree you may well be asked to write an academic book review. This is a different sort of essay writing experience. Here are 10 key points to bear in mind when preparing a great review:-

What even is an essay?

What is an essay and why have you been asked to write one? The word essay is from the French, essayer, meaning ‘to try’.For the purposes of writing, whether at school, college or university, the essay is an attempt to explain your opinion about an issue, namely the essay question that you have been set. Your lecturer wants to know that you have an opinion and see that you can express this clearly within the essay writing assignment.

Essay Help: Is it ‘-ize’ or ‘-ise’?

When you type up your essay and carry out editing, you want to be sure that your spelling and grammar aren’t going to let you down. Sloppy presentation and bad spelling, can make the reader concerned that if you’ve paid so little attention to your English usage, what other mistakes have you made during your essay editing?

But sometimes there is a spelling that even the experts can disagree on. The choice of whether to use -ize or –ise at the ends of some words is a topic that, surprisingly perhaps, stirs up plenty of feeling.
Essay editing decisionsEssay editing: ‘-ize’ or ‘-ise’

Always giving up? Essay writing and procrastination

Focusing on good essay writing technique is all very well, but for many of us sitting down to write an essay at all can be major hurdle. Maybe you have found yourself awake at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning with an essay or assignment deadline looming, unable to write more than a few scribbled sentences? How can you break the deadlock?

Is there a PhD in you?

Many people dream of taking a PhD, but what is really involved in getting these letters after your name?

What is a PhD?

The letters are an abbreviation for ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ and you might also see it written as ‘DPhil’. This type of degree emerged from Germany in the early 1800s and it is intended to be a research degree where you focus on finding the solution to a tightly defined problem.Your work must be original.