Essay guidance: Knowing that, for many of you, this may be one of the first research essays you will have been asked to produce at the ‘degree level studies,’ I have written the following to give you a clearer indication of what you need to do, at this level, to produce good academic writing. An essay at degree and diploma level is:
 an argument o more specifically it is your argument in relation to the question that you have been set. This means that it is not just a summary of someone else’s views or writing, but is instead a piece of academic work in which you present your answer to the question asked, that draws on a range of other people’s published academic material to support and develop your answer.
 this argument must have a clear, logical structure; o this means explicit sections, that each deal with a particular aspect of your core argument and an Introduction that tells the reader what you will argue and how you will structure your argument.
 that has evidence of substantial reading of relevant academic material;
 that supports its main points through references to published academic material;
 that has a Conclusion which summarises again your argument and how you developed this in the main sections of your essay; and
 that has an alphabetically ordered sources in the reference list. This concept of using an essay to develop and present an ‘argument’ is, I know, unfamiliar to many of you. You may be more used to writing essays that merely summarise ‘for’ and
‘against’ points of view, or that summarise a source such as a textbook. Some others of you may not have written essays at all for quite a while. So to help with understanding what is meant by developing an ‘argument’ in your essay I have, for the essay question, provided an illustrative opening paragraph that presents one possible