Completing the Major Assignment: Checklist
In order to complete your major assignment to a high standard, please make sure you address the following checklist items.....
- Make sure you fully understand the feedback you received from the JAR task:
- Clarify your understanding of the Harvard system - both for the final reference list and for in-text citations.
- Clarify what constitutes an 'academic article' and how many you need as a minimum to answer the question.
- Clarify your expression if needed; academic essays require you to demonstrate a command of specific language - layman's terminology and inaccurate/vague discussion will not score a pass grade.
- Make sure you understand the requirements of the question asked!
Select the topic you are interested in. YOU DO NOT have to do the same topic that your JAR focused on - you may change to the other option.
- Do you know what the question requires you to do?
- How can you address ALL aspects of the question?
- Talk with your tutor about your plan?
- Plan your essay carefully
- The question options are broad in scope - you must narrow the focus to something you are particularly interested in. For example - you may wish to focus on how planning theory works in times of crises; similarly, you may wish to focus on how change occurs in not-for-profit organisations. The focus of your paper is completely up to you.
- Find a minimum of 7 academic journal articles focused on this narrow topic of your choosing; NB: your paper must focus on organisations of some sort.
Your tutor/lecturer is NOT in a position to read your paper in advance - however, you are welcome to discuss the scope and focus of your paper to make sure it is on the right track.
Write your essay carefully!
- Demonstrate that you have command of the academic concepts and language. The best way to do this is to (a) DEFINE all of the key concepts involved in your topic - break them down into key elements , AND (b) demonstrate how the elements you have identified interact (or don't!) to answer the question.
- Make sure that your essay has something to say about the theory in the particular context you have chosen.
- Your conclusion should include the implications your work has for practising managers - i.e. if you were a consultant, what recommendations would your assignment have for managers "in the real world?"
- Spelling and grammar errors are unacceptable! Proof read your work before handing it in!
Planning and writing your essay
Unless you have truly remarkable powers of handling multiple sources of information simultaneously in your working memory, you will need to follow your research and note taking by making out a plan before you begin to write an essay. Indeed, it is a false economy
to spend little or no time on the plan, thinking that you will sort out any gaps or fuzzy bits during the process of writing - you are more likely to get stuck or wander away from your line of argument/discussion. Time spent on effective planning should quickly repay itself by greatly cutting down writing time.
Answering the question
To understand what a good plan looks like, you need to be clear on what it should enable you to do. Certainly that is to write out the full essay, but what are you trying to do in that? Whatever your topic, the same applies: the cleverest thing you can do is answer the question. Although many people believe this to be obvious, one of the most common faults with early essays is their failure to address and/or to answer the question the tutor or examiner has set.
An essay question asks you to do something(s) and so establishes a domain of relevance for your answer - to 'compare and contrast...', 'discuss...', spell out 'why...' or 'how...' and so forth. Some concepts, arguments and sources of evidence are relevant to answering it, many more are not. Analysing what the question means, and what material is relevant to answering it, is an important part of planning an essay's structure. No essay question is ever intended to mean 'write out everything you know about X', unless it says so - and generally it won't! Often, however, producing an unordered list of points that they have come across in connection with terms in the essay title is precisely what people end up doing. This is especially likely to happen if you make up your own essay titles by simply putting a noun phrase at the top of your paper, e.g. Tiaget's Theory or 'Learning and Development'. You should notice that the essay titles you are set are never noun phrases like those, although you may encounter something like 'What are the differences between learning and development in Piaget's theory?' For everything you include in an essay, you should be able to justify why
it is there and necessary to answering the question; if you can't, leave it out.
Building an essay plan should also aim to avoid a further common problem with essays: leaving the material to speak for itself. In a novel, it is considered a mark of skill to build up 'evidence' that leads the reader to a 'conclusion' that the author does not present explicitly, say 'X stumbled across the room, his speech slurred, as the empty whisky bottle caught my eye...' but not 'X was drunk'. In academic essays, however, it is important to express the structure of your argument and your conclusions as explicitly as possible. Each step of your argument, or order of discussion, should be stated explicitly and clearly, and part of building your plan should involve articulating precisely what those steps are and why they are going to be located as they are in relation to the other parts of the essay.
Planning
Your essay plan can usefully include five components:
(a) A summary of the introductory paragraph, which will orient the reader to what you are trying to do and how you intend to do it. This tells the reader what to expect and also sets the criterion of relevance against which they can judge whether or not your essay achieves what it sets out to do. Sentences in this paragraph should: highlight the terms from the title that you believe are important; make clear how you are interpreting the question; state your aims; and very briefly indicate the general line of argument and/or order of discussion that follows.
If the full version of this paragraph gets beyond about half a side, it's too long; cut out any superfluous material and/or make your prose style terser.
(b) In the order in which you will present them, the main points of your argument. Express the essential idea behind each stage of your essay in a single sentence.
(c) Under each of these points, a brief reference to the evidence, examples and supporting material that will be included to support it. This will mainly involve outlining someone's argument(s) and/or details of empirical studies. Arrows may be added to indicate any cross
reference between stages of the essay that you intend to include.
(d) A conclusion, which should relate to the essay question and follow clearly and logically from your preceding points.
If (a), (b) and (d) are expressed in coherent sentences (harder to do but far more effective than unrelated words or phrases), putting them together should produce an intelligible abstract or précis of your whole essay.
Interconnected material - linear order
If you follow the preceding guidelines about planning, then writing the essay should be a straightforward task of producing appropriate prose to flesh out the skeleton that you have constructed. Easy enough once you have mastered it, this fleshing out process often requires practice to prevent what should be an explicitly structured, systematic argument ending up as a list of points that seem relatively unrelated as far as the reader is concerned. This is not surprising. There are all sorts of interconnections between the issues, concepts and studies that are relevant to a typical essay. You may be able to express these for yourself in a diagram, and they should be made clear in your plan. However, when it comes to final writing, you have no option but to work in a linear mode, producing a series of words, one after another.
You have to use appropriate phrases in appropriate places to make the structure of your argument clear and compelling to the reader. The best rule of thumb is that your reader should never have to try to work out for themselves why you have included any particular material in your answer. You should tell them, and do so at a time when they can best take advantage of that information. Ask yourself: how likely is it that someone paraphrasing my essay would end up with something close to my original plan? Have a serious look at how a good academic book or paper tries to make its structure transparent through sentences in the introduction, start of each section, and beginning and ending of each paragraph. In the meantime, some widely applicable suggestions are given below:
(a) Ensure that all the steps of your argument/discussion appear explicitly in the essay and are not left behind in your plan or your head. Don't just present the evidence for points that you wish to make, thus leaving it to speak for itself, or the reader to try to speak for it.
(b) As far as possible, make your question-related commentary as you go along, don't 'save' it all for a final conclusions section. The main conclusions should draw together what has already been said, not do new work for the essay. For example, if you aim to 'compare the views of A and B', avoid devoting two sides to what A has to say about X, Y and Z, then the same amount to what B has to say about X, Y and Z, only at the bitter end drawing attention to agreements and disagreements. By the time your conclusion launches into 'so, A and B agree on X insofar as ', the reader may have to look back four pages to check. It's fine to conclude: "As demonstrated above, A and B agree on X and Y but disagree on Z" - provided the agreements and disagreement really were explicitly flagged and spelt out for the reader earlier on.
(c) Don't 'save' your points or commentary until the ends of the paragraphs or sections in which they occur. As the plan proposal, above, suggested: evidence or examples should be assembled under points you are making, not before them. Don't spend half a page or more summarizing an experiment, then tag on words to the effect: This means X for the essay question.' Instead, start by saying 'X is demonstrated by a study that...', then summarize the experiment. This can help you to be more selective about what details of studies you present; and it is easier for the reader to work forwards rather than backwards.
(d) Avoid repeating the same point or conclusion in a series of paragraphs (though it is better to repeat yourself than not to comment explicitly at all). Say, for example, you want to establish that X is the case and you have three sources of support, A, B and C.
Obviously, you should not just write three paragraphs summarizing A, B, then C, with allusion to X nowhere in view. Neither is it good style to begin or end three consecutive paragraphs with X. Where a single point is supported by several sources of evidence, this branching structure can be expressed quite simply in words by saying something like: Three sources of evidence support the conclusion that X. Firstly, A....Secondly, B....Finally, C.... There are many similar constructions. For example, you can often begin a series of thematically related paragraphs with a sentence like:
"This paper shall outline three sources of evidence for X:A; B; and C", where you substitute brief phrases for A-C before the more detailed 3-step exposition. A similar solution copes with one piece of evidence, say A, relating to several aspects of an issue, for example X: Study A makes three important contributions to our understanding of X. Firstly, aspect 1 of A challenges the opposing view not-X. Secondly, aspect 2 of A suggests X2. Finally, aspect 3 of A confirms X3.
(e) Develop your repertoire of 'hooks' between paragraphs. Adjacent paragraphs should be explicitly related to one another in more than a spatial sense. One way of achieving this was shown in (d) above. Other methods involve making a paragraph's opening sentence follow on from the theme of the preceding paragraph, using expressions like 'However, further studies...'; 'An equally important point/issue...'; 'We need also to consider...'; etc. Alternatively, it is sometimes effective to start a paragraph, or to end its predecessor, with a query. For example, 'Might [whatever you've just outlined]have occurred because X?' explicitly licenses you to go on and discuss X.
Essay format
You have the content of your essay under control. All that remains is to get details of the presentation right. This section considers some commonly asked questions, and outlines essential aspects of making your essay fit the appropriate academic format. To section or not to section?
Should you subdivide your essay into separate sections, each with its own heading? In a practical report this would be essential. In an essay it is optional, but it will sometimes be useful. In general, you should think about introducing sections if you believe it will make the structure of your essay clearer and easier to follow for the reader. You should not sprinkle section headings throughout an essay as a substitute for clear, planned structure. If the sequence of your argument or analysis doesn't make sense, a series of logically unrelated section headings will certainly not help anything. Section headings can help you and the reader by marking key shifts in an essay's structure; they make it easy to see at a glance where each main division in the essay starts and ends. However, they do not speak for themselves. The introduction will still need to include something like: "This analysis is divided into three main sections. In section 1... Next, section 2... Finally...in section 3.' That is, section headings may mark the main steps of your answer, but you must be clear on what those steps are before you can use sections effectively.
Employed sensibly, section headings become increasingly useful as pieces of writing become longer. Most people can follow a few sides, but an extended essay of 4000 words will be about sixteen double-spaced pages of typing plus a reference list. By that point, section headings take on less of an optional quality and generally they should be used. When you read journal articles and book chapters you will see that they are almost invariably divided.
Conclusion section
The final paragraph of your major assignment should offer a statement summarising how your paper achieved what it set out to in the Introduction section. As such, it is vital that you make a clear statement about "what the paper sets out to do", so that in the Conclusion you can "summarise how the paper achieved that outcome". In the end, proper planning is essential; please do not think that you can simply submit a first draft effort and hope to score more than a failing grade - this is university, and you must demonstrate your command of the professional language!