parts of an essay question

The Writing Guide

• The First Thing
• Step 1: Understanding the essay question

Identify task, content & limiting words in the essay question

Words, words, words..., academic writing webinar part 1.

• Step 2: Critical note-taking
• Step 3: Planning your assignment
• Step 4a: Effective writing
• Step 4b: Summarizing & paraphrasing
• Step 4c: Academic language
• Step 5: Editing and reviewing
• Getting started with research
• Working with keywords
• Evaluating sources
• Research file
• Reading Smarter
• Sample Essay
• What, why, where, when, who?
• Referencing styles
• Writing Resources
• Exams and Essay Questions

Essay topics contain key words that explain what information is required and how it is to be presented.  Using the essay question below indentify task content & limiting words.  Regardless of your topic or discipline, if you can identify these words in your essay topic, you can begin to consider what you will need to do to answer the question.

Task words : These are words that tell you what to do, for example “compare”, “discuss”, “critically evaluate”, “explain” etc.

Content words : These words in the essay topic will tell you which ideas and concepts should form the knowledge base of the assignment. Refer to subject specific dictionary or glossary.

Effective communication is considered a core skill in higher education and is usually conveyed through the medium of academic papers and essays. Discuss the process of writing academic essays and critically examine the importance of structure and content.

Before you scroll down to the next box, what can you unpack from this topic? What are you actually going to look for in a search tool like One Search? What are you supposed to do?

• Content Words
• Limiting Words
• Context Words

Task words are usually verbs and they tell you what to do to complete your assignment.

You need to identify these words, because you will need to follow these instructions to pass the assignment.  As you research and write your assignment, check these words occasionally to make sure you are still doing what you have been asked to do.

Here are some definitions of different academic task words.  Make sure you know exactly what you need to do for your assignment.

Don't try to use them in your research - they aren't things to find, only things to do.

The task words from our sample question are:

Effective communication is considered a core skill in higher education and is usually conveyed through the medium of academic papers and essays. Discuss the process of writing academic essays and critically examine the importance of structure and content.

• Discuss means to "consider and offer an interpretation or evaluation of something; or give a judgment on the value of arguments for and against something"
• Examine means to inspect something in detail and investigate the implications

So, you would need to give a short description of what essay writing is all about, and then offer an evaluation of the essay structure and the way it presents content.

• Task Words Here are some definitions of different academic task words. Make sure you know exactly what you need to do for your assignment.

The content words are the "meat" of the question - these are things you can research.

Effective communication is considered a core skill in higher education and is usually conveyed through the medium of academic papers and essays . Discuss the process of writing academic essays and critically examine the importance of structure and content .

You will often be asked to talk about "the role" something plays or "processes", "importance", "methods" or "implementations" - but you can't really research these things just by looking for those words.

You need to find the keywords - the most concrete concepts - and search for those.  The information you find about the concrete terms will tell you about the "roles" and "methods", the "process" or the "importance", but they probably won't use those words exactly.

One of the core skills of academic research is learning to extrapolate :  to find the connections in the information you can find that will help you answer the questions which don't have clear, cut-and-dry answers in the books and articles.

So, the core keywords/concepts to research are:

• "academic writing"
• "higher education"
• structure and content

Limiting words keep you focused on a particular area, and stop you from trying to research everything in the history of mankind.

They could limit you by:

• Time (you may be asked to focus on the last 5 years, or the late 20th Century, for example)
• Place (you may be asked to focus on Australia, or Queensland, or South-East Asia)
• People groups (such as "women over the age of 50" or "people from low socio-economic backgrounds" or "Australians of Asian descent")
• Extent (you are only to look at a particular area, or the details you believe are most relevant or appropriate).

In this example, you have two limits:

• "higher education" is the industry focus. This could be expanded to include the tertiary or university sector.
• Essays - we are concentrating on essay writing as the aspect of communication.  Note that this is also a content word. There can be (and usually is) some crossover.

Sometimes it can help to add your own limits .  With health sciences, you almost always limit your research to the last five or six years. Social sciences  are not as strict with the date range but it's still a good idea to keep it recent.  You could specifically look at the Australian context.  You may decide to focus on the private sector within that industry.

With the question above you could limit yourself to only looking at first year university students.

Sometimes an assignment task will give you phrases or sentences that aren't part of the task at all:  they exist to give you some context .

These can be ignored when you do your research, but you should read over them occasionally as you are writing your assignment.  They help you know what the lecturer was thinking about (and wanted you to think about) when they set that task.

Effective communication is considered a core skill in higher education and is usually conveyed through the medium of academic papers and essays . Discuss the process of writing academic essays and critically examine the importance of structure and content.

You don't have to do anything with the first sentence of this question - but it does get you to think specifically about the "using essays to communicate knoweldge" - something that isn't mentioned in the task itself.

Obviously, whoever wrote the task wants you to think about the assignments as a form of writing and communication.

It is easy to get distracted and go off on tangents when doing your research .  Use the context words to  help you keep your focus where it should be.

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• Focus and Precision: How to Write Essays that Answer the Question

About the Author Stephanie Allen read Classics and English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is currently researching a PhD in Early Modern Academic Drama at the University of Fribourg.

We’ve all been there. You’ve handed in an essay and you think it’s pretty great: it shows off all your best ideas, and contains points you’re sure no one else will have thought of.

You’re not totally convinced that what you’ve written is relevant to the title you were given – but it’s inventive, original and good. In fact, it might be better than anything that would have responded to the question. But your essay isn’t met with the lavish praise you expected. When it’s tossed back onto your desk, there are huge chunks scored through with red pen, crawling with annotations like little red fire ants: ‘IRRELEVANT’; ‘A bit of a tangent!’; ‘???’; and, right next to your best, most impressive killer point: ‘Right… so?’. The grade your teacher has scrawled at the end is nowhere near what your essay deserves. In fact, it’s pretty average. And the comment at the bottom reads something like, ‘Some good ideas, but you didn’t answer the question!’.

If this has ever happened to you (and it has happened to me, a lot), you’ll know how deeply frustrating it is – and how unfair it can seem. This might just be me, but the exhausting process of researching, having ideas, planning, writing and re-reading makes me steadily more attached to the ideas I have, and the things I’ve managed to put on the page. Each time I scroll back through what I’ve written, or planned, so far, I become steadily more convinced of its brilliance. What started off as a scribbled note in the margin, something extra to think about or to pop in if it could be made to fit the argument, sometimes comes to be backbone of a whole essay – so, when a tutor tells me my inspired paragraph about Ted Hughes’s interpretation of mythology isn’t relevant to my essay on Keats, I fail to see why. Or even if I can see why, the thought of taking it out is wrenching. Who cares if it’s a bit off-topic? It should make my essay stand out, if anything! And an examiner would probably be happy not to read yet another answer that makes exactly the same points. If you recognise yourself in the above, there are two crucial things to realise. The first is that something has to change: because doing well in high school exam or coursework essays is almost totally dependent on being able to pin down and organise lots of ideas so that an examiner can see that they convincingly answer a question. And it’s a real shame to work hard on something, have good ideas, and not get the marks you deserve. Writing a top essay is a very particular and actually quite simple challenge. It’s not actually that important how original you are, how compelling your writing is, how many ideas you get down, or how beautifully you can express yourself (though of course, all these things do have their rightful place). What you’re doing, essentially, is using a limited amount of time and knowledge to really answer a question. It sounds obvious, but a good essay should have the title or question as its focus the whole way through . It should answer it ten times over – in every single paragraph, with every fact or figure. Treat your reader (whether it’s your class teacher or an external examiner) like a child who can’t do any interpretive work of their own; imagine yourself leading them through your essay by the hand, pointing out that you’ve answered the question here , and here , and here. Now, this is all very well, I imagine you objecting, and much easier said than done. But never fear! Structuring an essay that knocks a question on the head is something you can learn to do in a couple of easy steps. In the next few hundred words, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned through endless, mindless crossings-out, rewordings, rewritings and rethinkings.

Top tips and golden rules

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told to ‘write the question at the top of every new page’- but for some reason, that trick simply doesn’t work for me. If it doesn’t work for you either, use this three-part process to allow the question to structure your essay:

1)     Work out exactly what you’re being asked

It sounds really obvious, but lots of students have trouble answering questions because they don’t take time to figure out exactly what they’re expected to do – instead, they skim-read and then write the essay they want to write. Sussing out a question is a two-part process, and the first part is easy. It means looking at the directions the question provides as to what sort of essay you’re going to write. I call these ‘command phrases’ and will go into more detail about what they mean below. The second part involves identifying key words and phrases.

2)     Be as explicit as possible

Use forceful, persuasive language to show how the points you’ve made do answer the question. My main focus so far has been on tangential or irrelevant material – but many students lose marks even though they make great points, because they don’t quite impress how relevant those points are. Again, I’ll talk about how you can do this below.

3)     Be brutally honest with yourself about whether a point is relevant before you write it.

It doesn’t matter how impressive, original or interesting it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re panicking, and you can’t think of any points that do answer the question. If a point isn’t relevant, don’t bother with it. It’s a waste of time, and might actually work against you- if you put tangential material in an essay, your reader will struggle to follow the thread of your argument, and lose focus on your really good points.

Put it into action: Step One

Let’s imagine you’re writing an English essay about the role and importance of the three witches in Macbeth . You’re thinking about the different ways in which Shakespeare imagines and presents the witches, how they influence the action of the tragedy, and perhaps the extent to which we’re supposed to believe in them (stay with me – you don’t have to know a single thing about Shakespeare or Macbeth to understand this bit!). Now, you’ll probably have a few good ideas on this topic – and whatever essay you write, you’ll most likely use much of the same material. However, the detail of the phrasing of the question will significantly affect the way you write your essay. You would draw on similar material to address the following questions: Discuss Shakespeare’s representation of the three witches in Macbeth . How does Shakespeare figure the supernatural in Macbeth ?   To what extent are the three witches responsible for Macbeth’s tragic downfall? Evaluate the importance of the three witches in bringing about Macbeth’s ruin. Are we supposed to believe in the three witches in Macbeth ? “Within Macbeth ’s representation of the witches, there is profound ambiguity about the actual significance and power of their malevolent intervention” (Stephen Greenblatt). Discuss.   I’ve organised the examples into three groups, exemplifying the different types of questions you might have to answer in an exam. The first group are pretty open-ended: ‘discuss’- and ‘how’-questions leave you room to set the scope of the essay. You can decide what the focus should be. Beware, though – this doesn’t mean you don’t need a sturdy structure, or a clear argument, both of which should always be present in an essay. The second group are asking you to evaluate, constructing an argument that decides whether, and how far something is true. Good examples of hypotheses (which your essay would set out to prove) for these questions are:

• The witches are the most important cause of tragic action in Macbeth.
• The witches are partially, but not entirely responsible for Macbeth’s downfall, alongside Macbeth’s unbridled ambition, and that of his wife.
• We are not supposed to believe the witches: they are a product of Macbeth’s psyche, and his downfall is his own doing.
• The witches’ role in Macbeth’s downfall is deliberately unclear. Their claim to reality is shaky – finally, their ambiguity is part of an uncertain tragic universe and the great illusion of the theatre. (N.B. It’s fine to conclude that a question can’t be answered in black and white, certain terms – as long as you have a firm structure, and keep referring back to it throughout the essay).

The final question asks you to respond to a quotation. Students tend to find these sorts of questions the most difficult to answer, but once you’ve got the hang of them I think the title does most of the work for you – often implicitly providing you with a structure for your essay. The first step is breaking down the quotation into its constituent parts- the different things it says. I use brackets: ( Within Macbeth ’s representation of the witches, ) ( there is profound ambiguity ) about the ( actual significance ) ( and power ) of ( their malevolent intervention ) Examiners have a nasty habit of picking the most bewildering and terrifying-sounding quotations: but once you break them down, they’re often asking for something very simple. This quotation, for example, is asking exactly the same thing as the other questions. The trick here is making sure you respond to all the different parts. You want to make sure you discuss the following:

• Do you agree that the status of the witches’ ‘malevolent intervention’ is ambiguous?
• What is its significance?
• How powerful is it?

Step Two: Plan

Having worked out exactly what the question is asking, write out a plan (which should be very detailed in a coursework essay, but doesn’t have to be more than a few lines long in an exam context) of the material you’ll use in each paragraph. Make sure your plan contains a sentence at the end of each point about how that point will answer the question. A point from my plan for one of the topics above might look something like this:

To what extent are we supposed to believe in the three witches in Macbeth ?  Hypothesis: The witches’ role in Macbeth’s downfall is deliberately unclear. Their claim to reality is uncertain – finally, they’re part of an uncertain tragic universe and the great illusion of the theatre. Para.1: Context At the time Shakespeare wrote Macbeth , there were many examples of people being burned or drowned as witches There were also people who claimed to be able to exorcise evil demons from people who were ‘possessed’. Catholic Christianity leaves much room for the supernatural to exist This suggests that Shakespeare’s contemporary audience might, more readily than a modern one, have believed that witches were a real phenomenon and did exist.

My final sentence (highlighted in red) shows how the material discussed in the paragraph answers the question. Writing this out at the planning stage, in addition to clarifying your ideas, is a great test of whether a point is relevant: if you struggle to write the sentence, and make the connection to the question and larger argument, you might have gone off-topic.

Step Three: Paragraph beginnings and endings

The final step to making sure you pick up all the possible marks for ‘answering the question’ in an essay is ensuring that you make it explicit how your material does so. This bit relies upon getting the beginnings and endings of paragraphs just right. To reiterate what I said above, treat your reader like a child: tell them what you’re going to say; tell them how it answers the question; say it, and then tell them how you’ve answered the question. This need not feel clumsy, awkward or repetitive. The first sentence of each new paragraph or point should, without giving too much of your conclusion away, establish what you’re going to discuss, and how it answers the question. The opening sentence from the paragraph I planned above might go something like this:

Early modern political and religious contexts suggest that Shakespeare’s contemporary audience might more readily have believed in witches than his modern readers.

The sentence establishes that I’m going to discuss Jacobean religion and witch-burnings, and also what I’m going to use those contexts to show. I’d then slot in all my facts and examples in the middle of the paragraph. The final sentence (or few sentences) should be strong and decisive, making a clear connection to the question you’ve been asked:

  Contemporary suspicion that witches did exist, testified to by witch-hunts and exorcisms, is crucial to our understanding of the witches in Macbeth.  To the early modern consciousness, witches were a distinctly real and dangerous possibility – and the witches in the play would have seemed all-the-more potent and terrifying as a result.

Step Four: Practice makes perfect

The best way to get really good at making sure you always ‘answer the question’ is to write essay plans rather than whole pieces. Set aside a few hours, choose a couple of essay questions from past papers, and for each:

• Write a hypothesis
• Write a rough plan of what each paragraph will contain
• Write out the first and last sentence of each paragraph

You can get your teacher, or a friend, to look through your plans and give you feedback . If you follow this advice, fingers crossed, next time you hand in an essay, it’ll be free from red-inked comments about irrelevance, and instead showered with praise for the precision with which you handled the topic, and how intently you focused on answering the question. It can seem depressing when your perfect question is just a minor tangent from the question you were actually asked, but trust me – high praise and good marks are all found in answering the question in front of you, not the one you would have liked to see. Teachers do choose the questions they set you with some care, after all; chances are the question you were set is the more illuminating and rewarding one as well.

Image credits: banner ; Keats ; Macbeth ; James I ; witches .

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Essay writing: Analysing questions

• Introductions
• Conclusions
• Analysing questions
• Planning & drafting
• Revising & editing
• Proofreading
• Essay writing videos

Jump to content on this page:

“It is well worth the time to break down the question into its different elements.” Kathleen McMillan & Jonathan Weyers,  How to Write Essays & Assignments

When you get an essay question, how do you make sure you are answering it how your tutor wants? There is a hidden code in most questions that gives you a clue about the approach you should be taking...

Decoding the question

Here is a typical essay question:

Analyse the impact of the employability agenda on the undergraduate student experience.

Let's decode it...

Understanding the instruction words

Did you know that analyse  means something different to discuss  or evaluate ?  In academic writing these have very specific and unique meanings - which you need to make sure you are aware of before you start your essay planning. For example:

Examine critically so as to bring out the essential elements; describe in detail; describe the various parts of something and explain how they work together, or whether they work together.

It is almost impossible to remember the different meanings, so download our Glossary of Instruction Words for Essay Questions to keep your own reminder of the most common ones.

Redundant phrases

Don't get thrown by other regularly used phrases such as "with reference to relevant literature" or "critically evaluate" and "critically analyse" (rather than simply "evaluate" or "analyse").   All  your writing should refer to relevant literature and all  writing should have an element of criticality at university level. These are just redundant phrases/words and only there as a gentle reminder.

Recognise the subject of the question

Many students think this is the easy bit - but you can easily mistake the focus for the subject and vice versa.  The subject is the general topic of the essay and the instruction word is usually referring to something you must do to that topic .

Usually, the subject is something you have had a lecture about or there are chapters about in your key texts.

There will be many aspects of the subject/topic that you will not need to include in your essay, which is why it is important to recognise and stick to the focus as shown in the next box.

Identify the focus/constraint

Every essay has and needs a  focus .  If you were to write everything about a topic, even about a particular aspect of a topic, you could write a book and not an essay!  The focus gives you direction about the scope of the essay.  It usually does one of two things:

• Gives context (focus on the topic within a particular situation, time frame etc).

This could be something there were a few slides about in your lecture or a subheading in your key text.

I don't have an essay question - what do I do?

I have to make up my own title.

If you have been asked to come up with your own title, write one like the ones described here. Include at least an instruction, a subject and a focus and it will make planning and writing the essay so much easier. The main difference would be that you write it as a description rather than a question i.e.:

An analysis of the impact of the employability agenda on the undergraduate student experience.

I have only been given assignment criteria

If you have been given assignment criteria, the question often still contains the information you need to break it down into the components on this page. For example, look at the criteria below. There are still instruction words, subjects and focus/constraints.

Aims of the assignment (3000 words):

An understanding of learning theories is important to being an effective teacher. In this assignment you will select two learning theories and explain why they would help you in your own teaching context. You will then reflect on an experience from your teaching practice when this was, or could have been, put into practice.

Assignment criteria

Select two learning theories , referring to published literature, explain why they are relevant to your own teaching context.

Reflect on an experience from your teaching practice .

Explain why a knowledge of a learning theory was or would have been useful in the circumstances .

• Instructions words = explain (twice); reflect on.
• Subjects = two learning theories; an experience from your teaching practice; knowledge of a learning theory.
• Focus/constraints = your own teaching context; in the circumstances

Think of each criterion therefore as a mini essay. 

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Essay writing

Understanding essay questions.

The following guide has been created for you by the  Student Learning Advisory Service , for more detailed guidance and to speak to one of our advisers, please book an  appointment  or join one of our online  workshops . 

Understanding the essay question is the first and most important step you will undertake with any assignment, as without fully understanding the task you cannot respond to it. Consider the key elements in the question e.g.  Examine the role of women in Parliament since 1918, with reference to key Equality legislation  and ask yourself:

• What is the main subject of the question? (e.g. Parliament )
• Is there a particular aspect of that subject the question is asking you to consider? (e.g. the role of women in Parliament)
• Does the question indicate any limits to your answer? (e.g. the role of women in Parliament since 1918 )
• What is the ‘instruction verb’ in the question asking you to do? (e.g. Examine the role of women in Parliament since 1918)
• In addition, is the question asking you to demonstrate any specific areas of module knowledge? (e.g. Examine the role of women in Parliament since 1918 , with reference to key Equality legislation )

Identifying and understanding these different elements of your question will allow you to answer it confidently, directly and fully. If a question is long and complicated break it down into its component parts and consider what each is asking you to do.

Above all, do what the instruction verb is telling you to do:

The writer of the academic essay aims to persuade readers of an idea based on evidence. The beginning of the essay is a crucial first step in this process. In order to engage readers and establish your authority, the beginning of your essay has to accomplish certain business. Your beginning should introduce the essay, focus it, and orient readers.

Introduce the Essay.  The beginning lets your readers know what the essay is about, the  topic . The essay's topic does not exist in a vacuum, however; part of letting readers know what your essay is about means establishing the essay's  context , the frame within which you will approach your topic. For instance, in an essay about the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the context may be a particular legal theory about the speech right; it may be historical information concerning the writing of the amendment; it may be a contemporary dispute over flag burning; or it may be a question raised by the text itself. The point here is that, in establishing the essay's context, you are also limiting your topic. That is, you are framing an approach to your topic that necessarily eliminates other approaches. Thus, when you determine your context, you simultaneously narrow your topic and take a big step toward focusing your essay. Here's an example.

The paragraph goes on. But as you can see, Chopin's novel (the topic) is introduced in the context of the critical and moral controversy its publication engendered.

Focus the Essay.  Beyond introducing your topic, your beginning must also let readers know what the central issue is. What question or problem will you be thinking about? You can pose a question that will lead to your idea (in which case, your idea will be the answer to your question), or you can make a thesis statement. Or you can do both: you can ask a question and immediately suggest the answer that your essay will argue. Here's an example from an essay about Memorial Hall.

The fullness of your idea will not emerge until your conclusion, but your beginning must clearly indicate the direction your idea will take, must set your essay on that road. And whether you focus your essay by posing a question, stating a thesis, or combining these approaches, by the end of your beginning, readers should know what you're writing about, and  why —and why they might want to read on.

Orient Readers.  Orienting readers, locating them in your discussion, means providing information and explanations wherever necessary for your readers' understanding. Orienting is important throughout your essay, but it is crucial in the beginning. Readers who don't have the information they need to follow your discussion will get lost and quit reading. (Your teachers, of course, will trudge on.) Supplying the necessary information to orient your readers may be as simple as answering the journalist's questions of who, what, where, when, how, and why. It may mean providing a brief overview of events or a summary of the text you'll be analyzing. If the source text is brief, such as the First Amendment, you might just quote it. If the text is well known, your summary, for most audiences, won't need to be more than an identifying phrase or two:

Often, however, you will want to summarize your source more fully so that readers can follow your analysis of it.

Questions of Length and Order.  How long should the beginning be? The length should be proportionate to the length and complexity of the whole essay. For instance, if you're writing a five-page essay analyzing a single text, your beginning should be brief, no more than one or two paragraphs. On the other hand, it may take a couple of pages to set up a ten-page essay.

Does the business of the beginning have to be addressed in a particular order? No, but the order should be logical. Usually, for instance, the question or statement that focuses the essay comes at the end of the beginning, where it serves as the jumping-off point for the middle, or main body, of the essay. Topic and context are often intertwined, but the context may be established before the particular topic is introduced. In other words, the order in which you accomplish the business of the beginning is flexible and should be determined by your purpose.

Opening Strategies.  There is still the further question of how to start. What makes a good opening? You can start with specific facts and information, a keynote quotation, a question, an anecdote, or an image. But whatever sort of opening you choose, it should be directly related to your focus. A snappy quotation that doesn't help establish the context for your essay or that later plays no part in your thinking will only mislead readers and blur your focus. Be as direct and specific as you can be. This means you should avoid two types of openings:

• The history-of-the-world (or long-distance) opening, which aims to establish a context for the essay by getting a long running start: "Ever since the dawn of civilized life, societies have struggled to reconcile the need for change with the need for order." What are we talking about here, political revolution or a new brand of soft drink? Get to it.
• The funnel opening (a variation on the same theme), which starts with something broad and general and "funnels" its way down to a specific topic. If your essay is an argument about state-mandated prayer in public schools, don't start by generalizing about religion; start with the specific topic at hand.

Remember.  After working your way through the whole draft, testing your thinking against the evidence, perhaps changing direction or modifying the idea you started with, go back to your beginning and make sure it still provides a clear focus for the essay. Then clarify and sharpen your focus as needed. Clear, direct beginnings rarely present themselves ready-made; they must be written, and rewritten, into the sort of sharp-eyed clarity that engages readers and establishes your authority.

Copyright 1999, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard University

Understanding your assignment questions: A short guide

• Introduction

Breaking down an assignment question

Ways to get started, how do you narrow down a broad or general essay question, parts of a question, specific vs general essay questions.

• Further reading and references

Before you attempt to answer an assignment question, you need to make sure you understand what it is asking.

This includes the subject matter, but also the way in which you are required to write.

Different questions may ask you to discuss, outline, evaluate...and many more. The task words are a key part of the question.

Once you have broken down and understood your assignment question, you can start to jot down your ideas, organise your research, and figure out exactly what point you want to argue in your essay.

Here is something to try if you are struggling to get going with responding to the assignment question:

• Try to come up with a one word answer to the question ('yes,' 'no',' maybe'- or perhaps two words: 'not quite'; ''only sometimes');
• Then expand the one-word answer into a sentence summarising your reason for saying that;
• Then expand that sentence into three sentences. This could be the beginning of your essay plan.
• Choose one or two key aspects of the topic to focus your argument around.
• Focus on a few examples rather than trying to cover everything that falls under that topic.
• Decide on a standpoint you want to argue (this applies to specific essay questions too).
• Make sure your introduction explains your chosen focus aim and argument. 

Directive or task words : Tell you exactly what to do e.g., discuss, argue etc.

Subject matter : Specifically what you should be writing about. 

Limiting words : Parts of the question that may narrow or alter the focus of your answer. 

Example : To what extent can the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith be read differently in the light of the 9/11 Terrorist Attack?

• To what extent: This indicates you will need to explore both sides of the topic in a critical way and reach a decision
• Be read differently: This limiting phrase indicates that you will not be writing everything you know about White Teeth and 9/11. You will be focussing on whether or not the terrorist attack alters our reading of the novel. Every point you make should contribute to this.
• White Teeth: You will need to focus on this novel
• 9/11 Terrorist Attack: You will also need to write about this event in relation to the novel

Some essay questions may have a narrow focus e.g., 'To what extent can it be argued that Byron and Keats are second generation Romantic poets?'. 

While other may be quite broad e.g., ' Evaluate the effect of landscape on the expansion of the town'.

The first example indicates exactly which poets to focus on, and which aspect of their work to explore. The second example is much broader: it doesn't specify which features of landscape, or which towns should be analysed. 

Even if the essay question is broad, your answer should have a clear and specific focus. Therefore, you need to choose an area of the topic to concentrate on. If answering the second of the two questions above, you would not need to write about the impact if every type of landscape on every town in the world. It is normally better to write a lot about a little, rather than a little about a lot. 

It is also important to note that, although the specific essay question tells you which poets to focus on and which aspect of their work to discuss, it does not dictate which way you have to argue. You are still free to choose your own standpoint (based on evidence) as to whether or not Byron and Keats can be seen as second generation Romantic poets. 

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• Last Updated: Nov 13, 2023 4:28 PM
• URL: https://libguides.bham.ac.uk/asc/understandingassignments

Unit 4: Fundamentals of Academic Essay Writing

20 Exploring the Essay

Parts of an essay.

An essay typically has three basic parts, the introduction, the body, and the conclusion.

Student Model for Essay 1

The essay below is an authentic student essay. This essay was chosen as a model because it effectively demonstrates the characteristics of academic writing and has an important message for the reader.

Student name ESL 117 Essay #1, Draft #3

The Value of Peer Review in Improving Students’ Writing

The process of writing academic papers involves many steps: exploring a topic through reading and writing, narrowing a topic, organizing the ideas, writing multiple drafts, getting feedback and making revisions. Over multiple drafts, the writer refines his/her ideas in part by getting feedback from readers. In a classroom, the teacher and the classmates, or peers, can serve as easily accessible readers. Peer feedback, also called peer review or peer response, is widely used in writing classes for both native speakers and English as a Second Language (ESL) students. Peer review benefits both the writer and the reviewer, and it can be just as useful as teacher feedback.

Peer review is used in ESL classes to improve student’s English writing or get better grades on writing assignments. Many ESL programs involve international students in peer review to improve their writing skills, and many studies support the idea that peer review is essential to improve students’ writing skills. Bijami, Kashef and Nejad (2013) state that critical and specific peer comments can be utilized to enhance students’ writing skills and help students become competent writers (p.93). Peer comments can address specific aspects of writing. For example, peer comments help students improve their writing ability in terms of organization and content (Zeqiri, 2012, p. 50). Moreover, helping the writer identify the strengths and weaknesses in their writing helps the writer develop self-awareness. According to Tsui and Ng (2000), it is often difficult for students to see their own weaknesses, but peers can point out these problems (p. 166). These examples illustrate how ESL students’ writing skills can be enhanced through peer review because it helps them improve awareness of their papers’ strengths and weaknesses.

Not only does peer review benefit the writer, identifying strengths and weaknesses in another student’s writing plays an important role in improving the reviewer’s own writing ability. An important writing skill is to be able to recognize good writing by critically evaluating writing. By reading their classmates’ papers critically, students learn more about what makes writing successful and effective (Bijami et al., 2013, p. 94). In this way, reading other’s papers and being given criteria to look for allows students have a chance to develop these skills.

Furthermore, peer review seems to have some unexpected benefits for the reviewer. There are some studies that show that students who review peers’ papers are more likely to improve their writing ability than students who receive peers’ comments. Lundstrom and Baker (2009) conducted a study which compared the improvements in writing between givers and receivers of peer feedback and found that of the two groups, the giver group made more progress in writing than the receiver group (p. 32). This finding shows the givers (or reviewers) learned to judge their own work self-critically by evaluating their peers’ writing and transferring this knowledge to their own writing, resulting in significant improvements on their own papers. Thus, responding to a peer’s paper is an important way for a student to improve his/her own writing.

There are additional advantages of peer review for both the writer and the reviewer in terms of language skills, classroom environment, and confidence. Peer review not only helps students improve their writing skills but also helps them develop language skills. Language skills are developed through interaction and communication. Lundstrom and Baker (2009) write that peer review enhances not only students’ writing skills but also students’ speaking and listening skills (p. 31). Such research suggests that peer review can improve ESL students’ oral skills because they are involved in meaningful discussion and negotiations. Furthermore, peer review creates a student-centered classroom environment where students work together. Peer review encourages collaborative learning, in which students learn from and support each other (Tsui & Ng, 2000, p. 167). This collaborative group work helps to form a community of learners. In addition, peer review can increase a student’s interest and confidence in writing. Rather than relying on the teacher, the student is actively involved in the writing process (Bijami et al., 2013, p. 94). Such emphasis on learning independently further demonstrates the claim that as students take more responsibility for their writing, from developing their topic to writing drafts, they become more confident and inspired.

Although many students tend to prefer teacher feedback to peer feedback, there is evidence that peer review can be as helpful and meaningful as teacher feedback. In fact, recent studies reveal that there is no significant difference between teacher feedback and peer feedback in terms of improvement in students’ writing skills. In their study, Ruegg (2015) found that even though students who received teacher comments showed better performance on grammar than students who received peer comments, there was little difference between teacher comments and peer comments with regard to students’ improvements in areas such as organization, content, vocabulary, academic style and final grades (pp. 79-80). That is, peer feedback can be as effective as teacher feedback in revising students’ compositions and covers a wide range of writing skills. Based on their research which compared students who received peer comments to students who received teacher comments, Eksi’s findings (2012) also support Ruegg’s point that peer feedback enabled students to make significant writing improvements (p. 43). In sum, both teacher feedback and peer feedback helped students improve the quality of their writing.

In addition, teacher feedback and peer feedback can complement each other. To demonstrate this, Tsui and Ng (2000) cite a study in which 90% of the ESL students gave peer feedback that was judged to be valid by the teacher, and 60% of the students gave appropriate advice on aspects that had not been pointed out by the teacher (p. 149). These results mean that the vast majority of the student feedback was useful and accurate, and the students got additional feedback from peers that they would not have had if only the teacher had read the paper. Thus, peer feedback can expand the amount of useful feedback that the writer receives.

Many studies have shown the advantages of peer review such as improving students’ writing ability and language skills, developing students’ critical thinking skills and creating a student-centered classroom environment. That peer review is a time-consuming activity for both writing teachers and students is an undeniable fact, and students who are inexperienced in peer review will need training and guidance. Nevertheless, this investment in time and training gives students a powerful way to improve not only their writing skills, but also their abilities as thinkers and problem-solvers.

Bijami, M., Kashef, S., & Nejad, M. (2013). Peer feedback in learning English writing: Advantages and disadvantages. Journal of Studies in Education 3 (4), 91-7. doi: 10.5296/jse.v3i4.4314

Eksi, G. (2012). Peer review versus teacher feedback in process writing: How effective? International   Journal of Applied Educational Studies 13 (1), 33-48.

Lundstrom, K., & Baker, W. (2009). To give is better than to receive: The benefits of peer review to the reviewer’s own writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 18 (1), 30-43. doi: 10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002

Ruegg, R. (2015). The relative effects of peer and teacher feedback on improvement in EFL students’ writing ability. Linguistics and Education 29 , 73-82 . doi: 10.1016/j.linged.2014.12.001

Tsui, A., & Ng, M. (2000). Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer comments? Journal of Second   Language Writing 9 (2), 147-170. doi: 10.1016/S1060-3743(00)00022-9

Zeqiri, L. (2012). The role of peer feedback in developing better writing skills. SEEU Review 8 (1), 43-62. doi: 10.2478/v10306-012-0003-8

Academic Writing I Copyright © by UW-Madison ESL Program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Parts Of An Essay

This quiz is designed to test your knowledge on how to conduct a correct essay! Good Luck! Mrs. Hockemeyer

What is the "bulk" of the paper called?

The conclusion

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It is recommended that you write the introduction paragraph last.

What are you two very important things you should do after writing your essay, what is the first thing you should do when needing to write an essay, you should first write the body of your essay..

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