Tutors

5: Writing for Higher Education

Introduction

The quality of student writing in higher education has been the subject of critical attention in recent years. The topic was the focus of a major study by the Royal Literary Fund in 2006 that highlighted the struggle many students appear to have to write well-organised and cogent assignments and dissertations.

In particular, students struggle with issues of structure and paraphrasing, and also to resolve a tension they feel between expressing their 'own voice' in assignments, and satisfying the conventions of academic writing.

This is an issue that concerns many academics, and is currently being addressed by both the LearnHigher and the Write Now Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs): the former, with the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) project in the Academic Writing learning area; and the Writing for Assignments E-library (WrAssE) project in the Critical Thinking learning area; and in the latter CETL, the Student Authorship project, which addresses the issue of the relationship between writers and the facts, ideas and arguments expressed in their work.

Both CETLs are interested in developing resources for students and staff that demonstrate how authorship in academic writing can be established.

These resources will include examples of cogent writing, as it has been argued that students need to be shown what most tutors would regard as effective essays to become more aware of what is expected of them.

Contents of this section

Unit 1: Good Writing

This Unit discusses the idea, that to be taken seriously, you must present valid evidence in assignments. Aristotle, around 350 BC, argued that persuasive rhetoric included Logos: appeals to logic to persuade an audience through sound reasoning. This is done by presenting reliable evidence, usually in the form of facts, definitions, statistics and other data, that has an appeal to the intelligence of an audience.

Unit 2: Writing Essays

As this is an important issue for students, there are three exercises in Unit 2, and it may be necessary to spread these over two teaching sessions.

Unit 3: Writing Reports

Students were asked to 'unscramble' the five sections and match them with the 'classic' report structure presented to them.

Unit 4: Avoiding Plagiarism

There is no doubt that plagiarism continues to be a hot topic of discussion in higher education, but it is certainly not a new phenomenon. You can find all colours of opinion among lecturers: from those who seize on plagiarism as a symptom of slipping academic standards, devaluation of higher education, and an erosion of everything they believe higher education should be; to those who feel that there is more than a little intolerance, hypocrisy and inconsistency around the issue.