Assignments and academic writing in British universities

The comments below each statement will help you to understand more about academic writing at British universities, but you are advised not to read them until you have finished the quiz and calculated your score.

Many of the assignments set by tutors in British universities have titles in the form of a longer statement that students are required to critically evaluate in their response. In other words, the focus of the academic writing is likely to be very specific and to need careful thought and not simply involve general description.

The first step in tackling such an assignment is to be able to understand precisely what the question requires from you. A problem that tutors often have with students' assignments is that they have not addressed the assignment directly enough and are written 'off the topic'. This is why it is important to be able to analyse an assignment question effectively and identify what is required in order to answer it.

Plagiarism is the act of copying another person's words or pretending that their ideas are your own especially in academic written work. You must acknowledge the source you have used when you paraphrase another writer's work. Plagiarism is considered a serious offence in British universities and all students are expected to know this and to reference all use of source material appropriately.

In British universities any student found to have plagiarised in their academic assignments is likely to fail the assignment and perhaps even their course.

The length of the assignments you will have to write may vary during your course and, to some extent, this will depend on your subject area. Occasionally, you may be required to write a very short piece of academic writing (500 words), but it is more likely that your tutors will set assignments of either 2000 words or 5000 words for most of your coursework. An end-of-course masters dissertation is likely to require 15000+ words and a PhD thesis, 75,000 words.

At British universities you are expected to reference all source material which should either be in the form of quotation or paraphrase in your writing. In-text referencing means providing details of the author and date of source publication in the main body of your assignment and sometimes a page reference too. It is also necessary to provide a detailed reference list or occasionally a bibliography at the end of your assignment. There is a set way of doing this and you will need to be familiar with it and have practised using it when you come to write your assignments in English.

The internet is now an established research tool in many subject areas at British universities. Electronic journals and other online resources can provide much useful and up-to-date material related to your studies. It is important to develop the skills necessary to locate and retrieve such material quickly and effectively using the internet search engines available. This is a skill that is becoming as important to a student as that of knowing how to use a large academic library effectively.

Your tutors are likely to present you with long reading lists for each part of your academic course. You will be expected to have used these to research and prepare for specific academic assignments, as well as to extend your general background knowledge in your subject area. You will need to be able to select and find different reading material for different purposes and use appropriate note-taking procedures.

You will need to be able to extract and assimilate information from a large number of sources during your studies and can expect to have to read large quantities of material. You will certainly not have time to read everything very closely and slowly, however. There are different ways of reading, depending on your purpose: skimming and scanning are two quick ways of reading that you will need to use to extract either general or specific information from a text.

In a British university, your tutor will expect you to produce academic assignments that show a clear and logical argument. In English language, the responsibility for the clarity of the argument and ideas lies with the writer. In other words, the reader does not expect to have to do a lot of work to understand the argument; it is the writer's responsibility to make their argument clear. This is not the case in all languages. If academic writing in your first language is different, you will need practice in planning and organising your ideas to ensure that you can produce an argument that is clear to your English reader.

There are different kinds of academic writing that you may be asked to produce for your assignments. There are some differences in the structure and organisation of each, which you will need to know about. Examples of different kinds of academic writing include:

Reports, which may be required of business and management students

Technical or scientific reports, which may be required of engineering students or those studying science subjects

Essays, which may be required of arts students in particular

Literature reviews are generally found as part of masters dissertations in arts and social sciences.

You will need to have some awareness of the structure and organisation required for each kind of writing that applies to your subject area.

Academic writing has its own formal style. It involves a formal and often specifically academic vocabulary; use of fairly complex grammatical structures and good control of punctuation, spelling, writing conventions and presentational devices such as section headings, paragraphs etc. You will need to be able to produce this style in your written assignments for them to be effective.

Good academic writers have been shown to draft, edit and proofread their work before submission.

Drafting involves the writing and re-writing of versions of an assignment in order to produce an improved and final, best version to submit.

Editing involves making changes to the content and structure of a piece of academic writing, after careful consideration, in order to focus the argument and produce a good piece of writing.

Proofreading involves checking your writing once more for surface errors (e.g. spelling and typographical mistakes, grammatical slips, overuse of certain words or imprecise use of words) before submission.

You should know how to do all of these and have practised doing them in your written work.

A common mistake made by inexperienced students is to simply link together ideas that they have found in their reading to form their answer to an essay question. Unfortunately this is not enough and much more thought needs to go into the writing of an essay. You need to learn to develop and structure your own response to the essay question using source material to support your own argument but not to control it. This is a skill that can be learnt through practice.

Score: 10 and above
Your score suggests that you are already familiar with many of the academic writing practices that you will be expected to adopt at a British university. It is likely that you have already applied many of them. If you are aware of them but have not applied them before in your academic writing, then it may be beneficial to seek an opportunity to practise some of them beforehand. This will help you to improve both your skill and confidence before beginning your future studies at a British university. For more information about academic writing go to the weblinks page attached to this learning material.

Score: from 6 to 9
Your score suggests that you have some awareness of what will be required of you at a British university but perhaps have not had the opportunity to practise very much and some of these requirements are clearly new for you. It may be that you have not been asked to produce academic writing like this before. If this is the case, you are advised to make improving your writing skills a priority when you come to start your university course. You should receive plenty of practice in academic writing on the course and guidance from your tutors on how to develop the skills you need for your studies.For more information about academic writing go to the weblinks page attached to this learning material.

Score: 5 and below
Oh dear! Your score suggests that you still have a lot to learn about academic writing in preparation for university study. But on the positive side, it's a good thing that you did this activity because now you can start to address some of the gaps in your knowledge and improve your academic writing skills. Perhaps you have never been asked to produce academic writing in this way before. There is a new set of skills for you to learn and one good way to prepare for this is by doing an online course. You can learn the writing skills you will need and if the course is tutored, practise them guided by experienced university tutors.For more information about academic writing go to the weblinks page attached to this learning material.