In my country we don't have to focus on the title like in the UK; in my country it's necessary to write everything that we know on the topic - to show what we know. - Georgy
When you study at university in Britain you will need to produce written assignments. You can expect assignments to be set and marked by your tutors on a regular basis. These pieces of written work, often together with examinations, will be used to assess you on your course.
Producing academic written work in English can be demanding and will require careful management of your time. There may be differences from how you have done this before in your home country. You can prepare yourself better for writing academic assignments in English if you know what differences to expect.
This activity will help you to recognise any differences between the kind of academic writing that you may have produced before and the kind that you will be asked to produce at a British university. It will also give suggestions for how to prepare yourself for academic writing before you arrive in the UK.
Are you prepared for academic writing?
You are going to do a quiz to find out how much you know about academic writing at university in Britain. At the end of the quiz you can check your score.
Instruction
Study these statements about academic writing and decide if you think they are true or false. Select the 'True' or the 'False' button for each of the eight statements before reading the feedback. When you have finished, calculate your score and read the feedback to find out how much you know about academic writing at university in Britain.
Click on 'True' or 'False' to make a selection. You can click again if you wish to change your answer.
1. Assignment questions and titles are usually short and focus on one idea which needs to be explored.
Many assignments set by tutors in British universities involve a statement, sometimes long and quite complex, and question(s) related to this. The assignment will therefore often have several parts to it. When responding, students need to address several specific aspects of the question, often exploring and evaluating them in a critical way. This makes the focus of academic writing assignments very specific, and careful thought is needed when preparing an answer.
A problem that tutors often have with students' assignments is that they have not addressed the assignment directly enough and have written 'off the topic'. For this reason, it is important to be able to analyse an assignment question effectively, identify what is required in order to answer it, and produce a focussed answer.
2. The length of your written assignments may be 2000 or even 5000 words.
The length of the assignments you will have to write may vary during your course and can also 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 course work. An end-of-course masters dissertation is likely to require 15000+ words; a doctorate thesis may be 75,000 words.
3. Planning and organising your writing are less important than the expression of ideas.
The way in which the content of your essay is organised and expressed is as important as the actual ideas it contains and has an impact on how your work is received. In formal written English language, the reader should not have to do a lot of work to understand an academic argument; it is the writer's responsibility to make their argument clear. In order to communicate your answer to an essay question effectively, good planning and organisation are essential.
4. Plagiarism simply means copying another student's work and calling it your own.
Plagiarism can also mean copying text from books, journals or the internet and claiming it as your own, or even using another writer's ideas expressed in your own words but without acknowledging the originator of those ideas. In other words, plagiarism is the act of copying another person's words OR pretending that their ideas are your own, especially in academic written work.
As well as listing full details of source material you have used or read at the end of your assignment in a bibliography or reference list, you also need to reference the ideas you have quoted or paraphrased in your writing, usually by providing the author's name and the date of publication alongside.
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 that assignment or worse.
5. Assignments set by tutors may require different kinds of academic writing.
There are different kinds of academic writing that you may be asked to produce for your assignments. There are also differences in what may be needed for different disciplines. 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 are usually required of students following courses in Humanities.
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.
6. Only a good vocabulary is important in producing a formal academic style in your written work.
Students sometimes mistakenly believe it is enough to have a large vocabulary in English in order to produce academic writing. Academic writing style does involve a formal and often specifically academic vocabulary. However, you will also need to be able to use a range of more complex grammatical structures and have good spelling and punctuation. As well as these, you will need to know about academic writing conventions such as how to reference. To convey meaning well, you will also need to use all of these features to produce writing that is cohesive and coherent. A large vocabulary is not enough on its own to write in a formal academic style.
7. Constructing an argument for an essay involves linking together ideas that you have read in books and other source material.
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. Much more thought needs to go into the writing of an essay. An assignment should have a structure that reflects your own response to the question and source material should be used to support your own argument, not to control it.
8. You may have to write several drafts before a writing assignment is ready to submit.
Good academic writers have been shown to produce several drafts, 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.
Editing involves making changes to the content and structure of a piece of academic writing, after careful consideration, in order to focus the argument on the assignment question and produce a better piece of writing.
Proofreading involves checking your writing once more for surface errors (e.g. spelling and typing mistakes, grammatical slips, overuse of certain words or imprecise use of words) before submission.
These steps are important if you want to produce high quality assignments.
How well-prepared are you for academic writing assignments? When you have finished, click the 'calculate your score' button to find how many correct answers you have and then look at your score below to find out what your score shows.
Find your score below and read your profile:
Score: 6 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 already do many of them at university in your home country. If you are aware of them but have not applied them before in English, your university may offer a pre-sessional course to help you improve both your skill and confidence before beginning your studies. There may also be a language support service offering in-sessional classes in academic writing or an advisory service that you can use once your course begins.
Score: from 4 to 5 Your score suggests that you have some awareness of what will be required of you at a British university but have perhaps 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 while studying in your home country. If this is the case, you are advised to make improving your writing skills a priority when you begin your university course in the UK. You should take advantage of any opportunities to prepare for academic writing before you begin your course. Your university may offer a pre-sessional (in the summer) course to help you improve both your writing skill and confidence before beginning your studies. There may also be a language support service offering in-sessional (during the academic year) classes in academic writing or an advisory service that you can use once your course begins.
Score: 3 and below Oh dear! Your score suggests that you still have a lot to learn about academic writing in preparation for your study in Britain. But on the positive side, it's a good thing that you did this quiz 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 the best way to do this is by doing a pre-sessional or similar preparation course before you begin your studies. On such courses, you can learn the writing skills you need and practise them guided by experienced university tutors.
Whatever you scored on this quiz, if you would like further help with preparing for academic writing before you come to the UK, open the review activity below.
Would you like to review the main points?
It is important to understand that there may be differences in the length and type of academic assignment that students are asked to write in the UK. There are other requirements for academic writing too, which you will need to become familiar with. You can now start to think about some of the specific skills that you will need to have to produce good academic writing.
There are plenty of web-based resources provided free by UK universities that you can use to help prepare yourself for academic writing before you come to the UK. Some of these provide information about what will be required of you and others provide useful practice material. Browse around the website of the university that you are planning to study at to see if there are any resources you may find helpful.
Are you prepared for academic writing?
