essay structure monash

EDF1013 - Academic writing

Essay writing

Learning objectives.

This resource will help you:

• understand the purpose and function of academic essay writing.
• develop your ability to plan and structure an effective academic essay.

What is the Purpose of Essay Writing?

"Writing essays ideally requires students to engage actively with material, to examine ideas in depth, to integrate and critically evaluate what they read, and to state their understanding clearly - which often means that they develop their understanding further" (Hounsell, cited in McCune, 2004, p. 257).

Academic essays have muliple puposes, including to:

• analyse, argue, and reflect;
• compare and contrast different positions; and
• discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a position.

Essays can be be chronological, sequential, or logical in order. The essay question or purpose should guide how the content is organised and how your position/findings are presented.

• Analysing Assignment Questions (PDF 611 KB) Check out these workshop slides presented by the Student Success team to learn more about analysing assignment questions.

How do you structure an essay?

The table below indicates what is generally included in each section of an essay.

This video (2:08 min) from RMIT University Library Videos (2021) provides an excellent overview of the structure of an essay. 

Further Resources

• Essay Writing (2.17 MB) Check out these workshop slides presented by the Student Success team to learn more about essay writing. This resource contains examples of an Introduction, Body paragraph and a Conclusion.
• Academic Phrasebank (The University of Manchester) Get some ideas for high quality sentence starters from the Academic Phrasebank.
• See an example essay plan and annotated essays from Monash University (2024). 

Access Student Services

• Services and Support (UniSC) UniSC offers a range of services for students, including help with academic skills, careers and employability advice, library support, and accessibility and wellbeing services. Visit Services and Support on the Student Portal to find out more.

McCune, V. (2004). Development of first-year students' conceptions of essay writing.  Higher Education, 47 (3), 257-282.  https://doi.org/10.1023/B:HIGH.0000016419.61481.f9 ​ 

Morley, J. (2023). Academic phrasebank . The University of Manchester. 

RMIT University Library Videos. (2021, October 2021). Essay writing [Video]. YouTube.

• Updated: Sep 10, 2024 2:16 PM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu.au/skills/essay
• UniSC Library YouTube

The Academic Language Feedback (ALF) guide

The ability to demonstrate an understanding of discipline content at university is closely linked to English language proficiency and academic literacy . This guide can be used for reviewing and proofreading your assignments.

Other elements

Grammatical elements

Sentence structure

Mechanics of referencing

Style and voice

Organisation and development of ideas

• Help & FAQ

Writing an essay

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• Social Work

Research output : Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Book) › Other

Other files and links

• https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Writing-Skills-for-Social-Work-Students/?K=9781352012224

T1 - Writing an essay

AU - Kirkwood, Steve

AU - Devaney, John

AU - Ross, Bella

PY - 2021/2/26

Y1 - 2021/2/26

N2 - This book will equip Social Work students with the knowledge, skills and confidence to produce first-rate written assignments. Part One focuses on the foundational skills needed to produce excellent written work. Students are taken through the core stages of working on an assignment, from planning the task and reading and note-making through to finding and evaluating sources, drafting a text, and editing and proofreading. Part Two hones in on the key types of assignment students will encounter on their degree. It contains dedicated chapters on writing an essay, a reflective text, a case study analysis, a literature review, a placement report, and case notes on placement. Each chapter contains examples and activities which will help students to test their knowledge and understanding.This is an essential companion for all Social Work students.

AB - This book will equip Social Work students with the knowledge, skills and confidence to produce first-rate written assignments. Part One focuses on the foundational skills needed to produce excellent written work. Students are taken through the core stages of working on an assignment, from planning the task and reading and note-making through to finding and evaluating sources, drafting a text, and editing and proofreading. Part Two hones in on the key types of assignment students will encounter on their degree. It contains dedicated chapters on writing an essay, a reflective text, a case study analysis, a literature review, a placement report, and case notes on placement. Each chapter contains examples and activities which will help students to test their knowledge and understanding.This is an essential companion for all Social Work students.

UR - https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Writing-Skills-for-Social-Work-Students/?K=9781352012224

M3 - Chapter (Book)

SN - 9781352012224

BT - Writing Skills for Social Work Students

A2 - Ross, Bella

PB - Red Globe Press

• Monash Enrich

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• Example of a great essay | Explanations, tips & tricks

Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks

Published on February 9, 2015 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes.

This example guides you through the structure of an essay. It shows how to build an effective introduction , focused paragraphs , clear transitions between ideas, and a strong conclusion .

Each paragraph addresses a single central point, introduced by a topic sentence , and each point is directly related to the thesis statement .

As you read, hover over the highlighted parts to learn what they do and why they work.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay, an appeal to the senses: the development of the braille system in nineteenth-century france.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

In France, debates about how to deal with disability led to the adoption of different strategies over time. While people with temporary difficulties were able to access public welfare, the most common response to people with long-term disabilities, such as hearing or vision loss, was to group them together in institutions (Tombs, 1996). At first, a joint institute for the blind and deaf was created, and although the partnership was motivated more by financial considerations than by the well-being of the residents, the institute aimed to help people develop skills valuable to society (Weygand, 2009). Eventually blind institutions were separated from deaf institutions, and the focus shifted towards education of the blind, as was the case for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, which Louis Braille attended (Jimenez et al, 2009). The growing acknowledgement of the uniqueness of different disabilities led to more targeted education strategies, fostering an environment in which the benefits of a specifically blind education could be more widely recognized.

Several different systems of tactile reading can be seen as forerunners to the method Louis Braille developed, but these systems were all developed based on the sighted system. The Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris taught the students to read embossed roman letters, a method created by the school’s founder, Valentin Hauy (Jimenez et al., 2009). Reading this way proved to be a rather arduous task, as the letters were difficult to distinguish by touch. The embossed letter method was based on the reading system of sighted people, with minimal adaptation for those with vision loss. As a result, this method did not gain significant success among blind students.

Louis Braille was bound to be influenced by his school’s founder, but the most influential pre-Braille tactile reading system was Charles Barbier’s night writing. A soldier in Napoleon’s army, Barbier developed a system in 1819 that used 12 dots with a five line musical staff (Kersten, 1997). His intention was to develop a system that would allow the military to communicate at night without the need for light (Herron, 2009). The code developed by Barbier was phonetic (Jimenez et al., 2009); in other words, the code was designed for sighted people and was based on the sounds of words, not on an actual alphabet. Barbier discovered that variants of raised dots within a square were the easiest method of reading by touch (Jimenez et al., 2009). This system proved effective for the transmission of short messages between military personnel, but the symbols were too large for the fingertip, greatly reducing the speed at which a message could be read (Herron, 2009). For this reason, it was unsuitable for daily use and was not widely adopted in the blind community.

Nevertheless, Barbier’s military dot system was more efficient than Hauy’s embossed letters, and it provided the framework within which Louis Braille developed his method. Barbier’s system, with its dashes and dots, could form over 4000 combinations (Jimenez et al., 2009). Compared to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, this was an absurdly high number. Braille kept the raised dot form, but developed a more manageable system that would reflect the sighted alphabet. He replaced Barbier’s dashes and dots with just six dots in a rectangular configuration (Jimenez et al., 2009). The result was that the blind population in France had a tactile reading system using dots (like Barbier’s) that was based on the structure of the sighted alphabet (like Hauy’s); crucially, this system was the first developed specifically for the purposes of the blind.

While the Braille system gained immediate popularity with the blind students at the Institute in Paris, it had to gain acceptance among the sighted before its adoption throughout France. This support was necessary because sighted teachers and leaders had ultimate control over the propagation of Braille resources. Many of the teachers at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth resisted learning Braille’s system because they found the tactile method of reading difficult to learn (Bullock & Galst, 2009). This resistance was symptomatic of the prevalent attitude that the blind population had to adapt to the sighted world rather than develop their own tools and methods. Over time, however, with the increasing impetus to make social contribution possible for all, teachers began to appreciate the usefulness of Braille’s system (Bullock & Galst, 2009), realizing that access to reading could help improve the productivity and integration of people with vision loss. It took approximately 30 years, but the French government eventually approved the Braille system, and it was established throughout the country (Bullock & Galst, 2009).

Although Blind people remained marginalized throughout the nineteenth century, the Braille system granted them growing opportunities for social participation. Most obviously, Braille allowed people with vision loss to read the same alphabet used by sighted people (Bullock & Galst, 2009), allowing them to participate in certain cultural experiences previously unavailable to them. Written works, such as books and poetry, had previously been inaccessible to the blind population without the aid of a reader, limiting their autonomy. As books began to be distributed in Braille, this barrier was reduced, enabling people with vision loss to access information autonomously. The closing of the gap between the abilities of blind and the sighted contributed to a gradual shift in blind people’s status, lessening the cultural perception of the blind as essentially different and facilitating greater social integration.

The Braille system also had important cultural effects beyond the sphere of written culture. Its invention later led to the development of a music notation system for the blind, although Louis Braille did not develop this system himself (Jimenez, et al., 2009). This development helped remove a cultural obstacle that had been introduced by the popularization of written musical notation in the early 1500s. While music had previously been an arena in which the blind could participate on equal footing, the transition from memory-based performance to notation-based performance meant that blind musicians were no longer able to compete with sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997). As a result, a tactile musical notation system became necessary for professional equality between blind and sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997).

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Bullock, J. D., & Galst, J. M. (2009). The Story of Louis Braille. Archives of Ophthalmology , 127(11), 1532. https://​doi.org/10.1001/​archophthalmol.2009.286.

Herron, M. (2009, May 6). Blind visionary. Retrieved from https://​eandt.theiet.org/​content/​articles/2009/05/​blind-visionary/.

Jiménez, J., Olea, J., Torres, J., Alonso, I., Harder, D., & Fischer, K. (2009). Biography of Louis Braille and Invention of the Braille Alphabet. Survey of Ophthalmology , 54(1), 142–149. https://​doi.org/10.1016/​j.survophthal.2008.10.006.

Kersten, F.G. (1997). The history and development of Braille music methodology. The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education , 18(2). Retrieved from https://​www.jstor.org/​stable/40214926.

Mellor, C.M. (2006). Louis Braille: A touch of genius . Boston: National Braille Press.

Tombs, R. (1996). France: 1814-1914 . London: Pearson Education Ltd.

Weygand, Z. (2009). The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Bryson, S. (2023, July 23). Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks. Scribbr. Retrieved October 7, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/example-essay-structure/

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• Subject guides
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Getting started

Law research and writing skills: Getting started

• Approaching law assignments This link opens in a new window
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• Back to Law guide

New to Law at Monash? This page provides links and tips to help you through your first semester or trimester.

Week 1 and 2

• Take our interactive tutorial about academic integrity .
• Learn essential research skills in Library workshops. Workshops are run as part of first-year Law units for both undergraduates and postgraduates.
• Read the resources on your unit Moodle sites , which include important information from your lecturers about the units you'll be studying as well as information from the library to help you learn legal research and writing skills.

Your first assignment

Understanding your assignment.

• Check your unit guide or Moodle site for assignment requirements and marking rubrics.
• Use legal dictionaries and encyclopaedias to look up terms and concepts you're not familiar with.
• Learn how to approach law assignments .

Doing your research

• Learn about legal research skills .
• Use the key law databases .
• Find relevant cases , legislation and commentary .

Writing the assignment

• Read our tutorials on writing case notes or writing legal essays .
• Make sure you cite and reference your sources correctly.

Throughout the year

• Take good notes in lectures to help you revise.
• Get advice from our librarians at a drop-in session .
• Use these resources to learn more about cases and the courts.
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Writing a Research Essay

My students often ask about how a research essay should be written, particularly with regard to the structure and style. You will be judged on the clarity of your writing throughout life so you must work on this skillset continuously if you want your ideas and thoughts to be taken seriously. The following are my recommendations.

• 1.1 Omit needless words
• 1.2 Do not overstate
• 1.3 Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity
• 1.4 Be clear
• 1.5 Avoid fancy words
• 2 Digital tools to use
• 3 Structure
• 4 Writers block and getting started
• 5 How to Reference in an Esasy
• 6 Plagiarism
• 7 Common Mistakes
• 8 Keep at it
• 9 A class exercise
• 10 References

Writing well

Strunk and White's, The Elements of Style [1], has stood the test of time as being a great book to improve your writing. If you do not have a copy, please borrow one from a library or consider buying one. It is not long, but I feel it is an indispensable guide for anyone. If you have not read this book and are a technical IT person, you may prejudge an English language style guide to be pretentious and complex but I have highlighted some excerpts below which should show you that this is not the case. Please obtain and read the entire book.

If you want the e-book, it is available from Amazon The Elements of Style . Be prepared for the best 67 cents you have spent in your life!

Omit needless words

This rule really benefits from some examples of common mistakes followed by the corrections. Below are again, some examples from Strunk and White.

Do not overstate

Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity, avoid fancy words.

If you need more convincing, you can read another author's favourite excerpts from the book in the article here: http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.murdoch.edu.au/stable/25594676 In short, make sure you read the whole book and start trying to integrate some of the ideas that resonate with you into your writing.

I think the following Aristotle quote provides a nice summary of this section.

Digital tools to use

There are numerous digital tools that you can use. These need to be used as tools and not as an excuse to be lazy and inarticulate in your writing. Using all the tools in the world will not transform poorly structured and worded writing into something genuinely meaningful.

• Grammarly - Tool to check some basic spelling and grammar but do not rely too heavily on it.
• Studiosity - Greater feedback on structural/technical issues, see links in LMS

The most important aspect of these tools is that you use them to try to locate your weaknesses in writing. Are you consistently doing something wrong? Try not to rely on them to turn poor work into acceptable work but instead as a learning tool in your continual development.

The image to the right [2] describes the overall structure that will work for most essays. Note that introductions should narrow in focus from beginning to end. The conclusion of a document should end with broader implications and future directions. The best way to structure the content within the body is described in greater detail below. Remember that there is no absolute right or wrong here, you will have to use your best judgement.

Many students don't put enough thought into how they structure their document. Remember that if your thoughts are unclear, then there is no way that when you come to write it will be any clearer. The lesson here is that clarity in your thought process will lead to clarity in the narrative of your writing. Clarity of thought on a topic should hopefully improve as you read more, so the pre-requisite for all of this is that you have done a lot of reading on the topic and have had the time to sit back and reflect on what you have read. The takeaway message: read a lot and read with as much lead time on your deadline as possible.

Most documents can be written with a variety of different structures. If the topic was World War 2, and obviously this is an enormous topic, the structure could vary wildly based on the story that we were trying to tell. If we simply wanted to describe the major events in a simplified manner then a chronological order might be best. Comparatively, if we wanted to reflect on the importance of technology in World War 2 then we might group technologies into, land, sea, air, communications and within these subsections, we might describe the developments in a chronological manner. If the topic was to describe the often underemphasized role of the colonies, then the first group of topics might be British, French and Italian colonies. Within the section British colonies, we might have paragraphs on Singapore, India and Africa.

The message I am trying to communicate is that there is no one size fits all set of headings that you can apply. A document's structure can take many different forms and will vary based on the story that you are trying to tell.

Writers block and getting started

This section is going to sound like it is contradicting the previous one on structuring an essay. There are many guides which will tell you to carefully plan the entire essay with clear thoughts and dot points on each paragraph. This advice is sound, but many, including myself, can struggle to get started, to commit those first few words on paper.

An alternative approach is to; just write! There can be nothing more intimidating and demoralising than having spent 15 hours reading on the topic and still having nothing to show for it. If you find yourself in this scenario, then my advice would be to just write! Get something down on the page, no matter how badly it is structured or worded. Once you have a terrible draft then at least you have something to work with. Many writers, will then revise, rewrite iteratively until they have something that they are satisfied with. You do have to be prepared to do the heavy revisions required. This could involve complete restructure of the entire document numerous times.

Again I will provide an excerpt from Strunk and White:

The takeaway message here is that for many writers, the writing is the idea/originality generation process and you may just need to get words on paper.

How to Reference in an Esasy

You can use IEEE style referencing or APA , but the most important thing is that you pick one and remain faithful to the style guide.

Essure that you know the difference between a reference list and a bibliography . Remember that at university, we really only care about the articles that are in your reference list. We expect that you have read many more articles than the ones that you citing.

The use of Wikipedia for citations is controversial, but I don't think that it should be. In many areas, Wikipedia is a stunningly good resource. My opinion is that while Wikipedia is great, it is never the original source of truth or information on a topic. Remember that when we cite articles we want to cite the original source. As an example, take the famous Churchhill quote below

Consider that we could use a range of potential sources for where this came from:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Wikipedia_links
• http://audio.theguardian.tv/sys-audio/Guardian/audio/2007/04/20/Churchill.mp3
• https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches/

Have a look at my reference list at the bottom of the page. What did I reference?

Know that there is a clear line between what is fair and unfair use of help in assessment. The aids that your University make available to you, such as Studiosity, Grammarly or in person help within the library are all fair. Paying someone to complete the work, using a previous submission, synonymizing text online or failing to acknowledge sources are all clearly in the Academic misconduct camp. This is not a hazy or fuzzy line. It is much better to submit nothing than to violate your own code of integrity as well as the University's.

Common Mistakes

The following are common issues that I see in student work:

• A string of loose unconnected paragraphs on the topic, which may be appropriately cited but fail to show that the student had a clear line of thinking from beginning to end. This is usually caused by a student overly relying on paraphrasing two to three sources. This work will fail to appropriately describe any sort of debate within the topic and fail to demonstrate any originality of thought. The remedy here would be for the student to spend much more time reading more articles on the topic.
• Student describing a really superficial topic, which does not reach the depth required for this level. In this case, there are two potential remedies for this problem: A) the student should have sought feedback on the article they were writing to get this feedback b) the student's understanding of the area is weak and a significant amount of reading is required to improve the level.
• The work never states anything original, interesting, important or deep. In this case, usually, the sources being cited are newspaper articles and technical magazines. The student either failed to read deeply on the topic and/or was padding out the work. Remember to write concisely, about topics that you care about and that you have done the necessary amount of reading.
• Overuse of quotes. Generally, the best way to cite a source is to paraphrase and use an in-text citation. Save quotes for things like speeches, or when particular the wording of a statement is very precise and you wish to avoid misrepresenting a statement. Note that I have overused quotes in this document. The quotes from J.K Rowling and W. Churchill are fine, because they are quotes of something that has been said. The reason that I have certainly over-relied on quotes from Strunk and White is that the lessons and wording of the best language style guide should not be butchered by someone who is not an expert in that field. The take-away message: use quotations sparingly.

You are not going to morph from being an average to a great writer overnight. It is going to take lots of time and effort. To reinforce this idea, I will end this with a quote from J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series:

I would also add that good writing generally requires you to revise and rewrite over and over. If you are wondering about the usage of a particular word, Guardian and Observer journalists have published their style guide here: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a

A class exercise

As an exercise in structuring and planning an essay, let's work as a class on how we could write an essay on heart attacks. Resist the urge to look up an essay. Start by listing keywords on your page. Then, in groups structure the resulting keywords into a coherent plan for an essay.

[1] W. Strunk and E.B White, The Elements of Style. 4th ed. S.l.: Longman, 1999. Hardback. ISBN|0-205-31342-6 (hardback). S.l.: Longman, 2000. ISBN|0-205-30902-X (paperback). With a foreword by Roger Angell.

[2] Monash University, Writing Essays , 2017. [Online]. Avaliable: https://www.monash.edu/rlo/quick-study-guides/writing-essays . [Accessed: 11 April 2019]

[3] W. Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons , 4 June 1940

[4] Linda Richards, J.K Rowling January Profile, January Magazine. [Online]. Avaliable: http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/jkrowling.html [Accessed: 11 April 2019]

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Undergraduate - Unit LAW1104 - Research and writing

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook . If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

6 points, SCA Band 3, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

This unit is only offered to students who commenced prior to 2015. The new offering for students who commenced in 2015 and beyond see LAW1112.

There are two components taught concurrently. The Writing component will teach basic skills in legal writing, with an emphasis on the types of writing required for assessment in other law units, including research essays and answers to legal problems. The Research component will provide students with the essential skills to undertake research tasks required for their law studies. Students will learn to analyse a research problem into searchable components; locate and update Australian and foreign primary and secondary materials by using online and hard copy library research tools; use and cite references correctly, and evaluate the relevance and authoritative status of legal materials.

Upon completion of this unit, students will be able to:

• design and implement an efficient research strategy to answer a legal research question, using the most appropriate online and paper-based research tools;
• critically evaluate the relevance, quality, authority and currency of the materials that they find;
• correctly use, attribute and cite the work of others and avoid plagiarism
• identify the hallmarks of good legal writing, and use them to edit and improve their own writing; and
• apply and develop their higher order thinking skills of evaluation, problem-solving, synthesis, and analysis in writing on legal topics.

Assessment Task 1 Research Report, comprising the proposed essay structure (1000 words) and the preliminary bibliography 20% Assessment Task 2 Research Essay (2,500 words) not including final bibliography 50% Class attendance, preparation and participation in class discussion and formal exercises for Writing component 20% Research Exercise 10% In class research exercise for Research component (500 words)

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. The unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

See also Unit timetable information

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Gerald Nagtzaam

Prerequisites

Co-requisites.

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