PREFACE

UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION

  The importance of writing in literary studies

  Four basic principles

  Practice and experimentation

  Preparing for work

UNIT 2: WRITING ON A PRESCRIBED TOPIC

  What essay questions ask you to do

  Types of prescribed question

  Exam questions

UNIT 3: DEVISING YOUR OWN TOPIC

  Some questions to ask yourself

  Giving your chosen topic a structure

  Giving your essay a title

UNIT 4: WHAT MARKERS WANT

  Assessment criteria

  Learning outcomes

  FAQs about how you are marked

  Imagining your reader as someone particular

UNIT 5: SELECTING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY TEXTS

  How to choose your primary texts

  Kinds of primary text and how to use them

  How to choose secondary texts

  Keeping notes on your reading

UNIT 6:  GETTING HELP FROM REFERENCE WORKS,ONLINE RESOURCES AND YOUR SUPERVISOR

  Using secondary texts

  Reference hooks

  Keeping references

  Reading what you found

  Learning By being supervised

UNIT 7: THE FIRST DRAFT

  Starting to write

  Keeping to a given format

  Writing to an outline

UNIT 8: DEVELOPING YOUR ARGUMENT

  Causation, correlation and coincidence

  Assembling a description or commentary

  Classification

  Presenting alternative arguments

  Experimenting

  Providing contexts for texts

  Comparing texts

  Building an argument around a word

UNIT 9: WEIGHTING DIFFERENT ELEMENTS IN　YOUR ARGUMENT

  Asserting, justifying and presupposing

  Generalising

  Giving examples

  Signalling attitude to your own argument

UNIT 10: THE VOICE TO WRITE IN

  Your register and your voice

  Mode of address

  Reacting to voices outside your adopted register

  Incorporating expressions from outside your adopted register

  Expressing taste and value

UNIT 11: REVISING AN ESSAY DRAFT

  Showing your essay's structure

  Sign-posting and connectives

  Mediating essay material for the reader

  Making local edits

  Keep earlier drafts or discard them?

UNIT 12: EDITING THE BEGINNING AND ENDING

  Particular prominence: the first paragraph

  Particular prominence: the last paragraph

  Beginnings, endings and essay structure

UNIT 13: INCORPORATING OTHER PEOPLE'S WORDS INTO WHAT YOU WRITE

  Quotation and paraphrase

  Indicating where someone else's words come from

  Plagiarism

UNIT 14: MISTAKES IN SPELLING, GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION

  What makes something a mistake and why does it matter?

  Problems with grammar

  Punctuation and the boundaries of the sentence: full stop, comma and semi-colon

UNIT 15: HANDING IN

  Meeting your deadline

  Judging when your essay is finished

  Bibliography

  Footnotes and endnotes

  Abstract or summary

  Table of contents

  Acknowledgements

  Final stage before submitting

  Preparing for a viva

  Publishing your work

Bibliography

Index