writing a good essay

Essay help – by remote e-learning

Virtual learning environments or course management systems have become popular with many higher education colleges. A software package can be used by thousands of educational bodies worldwide (e.g. Blackboard is used by over 3700 colleges and other educational bodies). These systems provide software which tutors can use to upload course information and the more sophisticated platforms allow tutors to set up a forum for each course, so that classmates can discuss the course or essay writing remotely.

Effective essay writing: academic style

One top essay writing tip is to use hedging. In your writing, ‘to hedge’ means that you protect yourself from criticism by using language that doesn’t commit you firmly to a particular point of view.

This means you use words and expressions like “It may be”, “Mitchell’s work appears to say”, “It could be concluded that”. Academic writers use careful words so that they don’t make claims that are definite when the evidence is uncertain. This may be particularly useful when you want to criticise another writer’s work. You don’t want your assertion that their work is wrong to sound like a personal attack, so writing something like “Mitchell’s work seems to ignore the changing economic circumstances” is not as combative as “Mitchell’s work completely ignores the changing economic circumstances”.

Exam essay techniques: planning under time pressure

It’s that time of year again; exams are looming and revision is your highest priority. But don’t forget, just learning the facts isn’t enough to score you the high marks you deserve. It’s also crucial to spend some time brushing up your exam essay writing technique, to save valuable minutes when you are under time pressure and stop you from panicking when you get into the exam room.

Punctuation: commas, apostrophes and quotation marks

As an editor, I see the same simple punctuation mistakes time and again costing students valuable marks when the overall quality of their work deserves a much higher grade. Whether it is everyday essay writing or an undergraduate dissertation, correct grammar punctuation is the quickest way to see a huge improvement in the quality of your work (not to mention better grades!)
The good news is that help is at hand! Listed below are examples and explanations of the most common errors in using punctuation marks, along with some simple tricks to help you remember how to correct them.

Essay writing guide: How to select an essay topic

Sometimes, instead of giving you a list of essay topics to choose from, a tutor will ask you to come up with your own essay questions. How can you come up with something suitable for the essay format?

1. Brainstorm. What are you interested in? What would you be excited to research? If you love the topic it’s going to make your research for the essay so much more enjoyable.