Not sure how to start sentences in your essays? Visit the Academic Phrasebank from the University of Manchester for examples you can use in your writing.

Analysing essay questions

Reading information about your essay assignment helps you identify:

The learning outcomes related to your essay
The main parts of your essay
The range of expected content/topics
The way your lecturer expects you to write

Check your study guide for assessment information (including assessment criteria to understand how your work will be graded).

Example assignment question

Key words in assignment questions

Look for the important words that tell you what to write about, as well as the way your lecturer expects you to write.

To organise content for your essay, it’s useful to relate broad ideas and concepts to more specific types/parts. You can then identify the topic of each paragraph in your essay.

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Understand your assignment task by:

identifying key words
identifying the relevant learning outcomes
starting to structure your assignment

From analysing the question to structuring your essay

Start by making an ideas map.

You can then easily organise content into clear paragraphs.

The start of each paragraph (the topic sentence) should clearly tell the reader which idea you are focusing on because the reader can ‘see’ your ideas map, and understand how you have organised your essay.

Common instruction words

Check with your lecturer about what their instruction words mean (as lecturers sometimes have different expectations.)

Related workshops

Academic writing

Reading journal articles for essays

Journals are collections of articles which focus on particular topics. These articles are published periodically, such as four times a year. One common purpose of an article is to report on new research. For your essays, journal articles can provide you with up-to-date content on topics you have to write or talk about. To efficiently read journal articles, you need to:

Quickly decide if the article is relevant for your assignment
Understand the structure so that you can find specific kinds of information

First page skimming

Information on the first page of the article will often help you decide if you should read further.

Abstract structure

Abstracts are particularly good for quickly deciding if the content matches what you need for your essay. They are usually organised into distinctive parts that provide an overview of the whole article.

Reading shortcuts

It is not always necessary to read the whole article. Two common shortcuts are:

Scanning: Use section headings of the article to find specific kinds of information.
Top and tail reading: slowly read the introduction section and then the conclusion to get a more detailed overview.

Common sections of a journal article

Journal articles commonly have distinctive parts (eg, Abstract, Literature Review, Discussion…). Each part has a clear function, which helps you to find specific information. (You may not need to read the whole thing.)

Taking notes for essays

There are different note taking options to keep track of your reading for essays:

Note taking apps (good for adding images, graphs, pdf attachments, etc)
Reading grids (good for comparing research findings)
Three column method (good for adding examples and follow up questions)

Example notes using OneNote

Note taking apps

OneNote (free to AUT students with Office 365)
Evernote
PDF expert
Adobe Reader

Reading grids

Three columns

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Using readings in your essay

To answer assignment questions, you often need to group content from your readings into broad categories - often called themes. This helps you identify reoccurring topics across different readings.

Showing your lecturer that you can identify themes in your essay is important because:

Themes focus on the big ideas and not just the people who have written about them, and
You can demonstrate deep understanding of the topic