Written Assignments

E later drafts, editing and final draft: If in your first draft you are developing your thoughts and your argument, in later drafts you are clarifying and reorganizing those initial thoughts into an effectively presented argument. Now your purpose is to communicate your ideas and argument to someone else - to your lecturer or your tutorial group - and you must deliberately shape your material for this purpose.

If your essay is well-structured, your reader should be able to skim it - reading only your opening paragraph, the first sentences of later paragraphs, and your final paragraph - and gain a confident understanding of your ideas.

Finally, in order to satisfy the fourth criterion It is expected that the essay will be competently presented , you must edit the final draft very carefully for errors of style, format, grammar and spelling. Mistakes here spoil the total effect of the essay.

These, then, are the main stages through which all students go in producing an extended essay. You will go through very similar

Stages in writing a lab report but the process within each of these stages may vary. These variations result from those differences between an essay and a report that we pointed out in Chapter 4. Your ­reading, for example, is often brief and limited to basic principle , your note-taking is frequently restricted to observations on the ex­periment itself.

The structure of a report is laid down firmly in advance, so you spend much less time in the planning and redrafting stages. Nevertheless some planning is required, particularly in the Introduction and Discussion sections where you must select and ­arrange ideas, facts and observations carefully. In the same way you must edit the final draft to meet the requirements of style and corectness that have been set out by the department.

For overseas students there may be additional difficulties relating to written English and to styles of argument and presentation, as we have seen in Chapter 2. The only way we know to improve your capacity to write essays is - to write more essays. And then to reflect on the ways in which your lecturer has graded and commented ­on your last essay, in order to improve your approach to the next ­ one. Our Indonesian student summarized her writing problems mainly in terms of structure and approach to the task: