Effective Academic Writing

Many of the Royal Holloway MBA programme, actually most candidates, have not studied under the UK university system before starting their studies.  One source of anxiety is always around meeting the expected academic writing style. 

Edited below are a few bits of advice I share with students. 

Harvard Referencing

It is often called the (Author, Year) method, where the author's last name is used in text and page number only if a quotation is used.  After the first instance it is acceptable to use the Latin 'et al' after the first author's name in text for succinctness. Every new idea is expected to be referenced to its original source.  Students are encourage to read academic journals to experience this writing style.

Bibliographies (at the back of a paper) should not include bullet points or number lists, and be sorted by Author's last name from A to Z.    You list only the sources you have read yourself and use 'op cite' if it pertains to older work in a newer text.  Note: class lectures are not usually recognised as published sources.   Full guidance is provided in the student handbook, but it is surprisingly often forgotten about in the pressure of an assignment deadline. 

Attention to detail

Think about walking into an interview - what impression does your first glance make - do you leave toothpaste on the side of your mouth and a bit of toast hanging off your beard ? Presentation is very important, more so in the early pages when key impressions are being formed.   A good UK spell checker helps ensure that words are accurately spelt - but it is important to proof read all assessed work, spell checker does not pick up wrong words and poor sentence structure. 

Too much description detail and a lack of analysis

New and returning students have a tendency to be overly descriptive and miss out on critical analysis.  Many students like to start with a general 'background' paragraph, which eats word count and generally does not earn marks.   At MBA level, descriptive content (re-working of ideas already presented) carries little or no credit (however well written). Critical analysis is expected.

A great starting paragraph explains the SET question and provides clear sign posting on the structure of the paper that follows. This can be concise. Students get poor marks sometimes because they do not really refer to the question at all, others decide to re-write the question into something different. There are zero marks for beautifully answering a different question.

Points for top enders

Fully understanding how to reference effectively, craft powerful arguments using published expert opinions and weigh opinions effectively using an academic tone is the academic writing challenge.      The very best way to develop a strong writing style is to read (you read for a degree !) widely across a variety of academic sources (text books and e-journals - accessed via EBSCO, Emerald and Science Direct).   Students can access our impressive range of e-resources on their own computers from listerally anywhere in the world (with an internet connection).  For the past couple of years Royal Holloway MBA candidates have benefited from a personal Economist subscription, which is also a great source of analytical writing, even if it does have a strong, right leaning political agenda.

Note from the Editor

Extra care was taken in seeking to minimise spelling errors and ensuring the text reads well, given the nature of the post !  As a touch typer with a can do agenda, spelling and grammatical conventions have never been a personal strength and I always took great care in proof reading all of my own University assignments.

Paraphrasing

Careful note-taking and paraphrasing ideas

"Much preparation for assignments involves taking notes from books or materials that you are reading. In taking notes, you should be careful not to copy sentences or paragraphs directly, unless you place them in inverted commas. If you omit the inverted commas, you might forget when you get around to writing that you copied directly and therefore plagiarise without realising.
It is good academic practice to learn to paraphrase arguments. To do so, you should read, say, a chapter of a textbook and use your own words and your own sequence of ideas to record the arguments as they relate to the issues raised by the assignment."  (Royal Holloway, 2011)


Bibliographic reference:
Royal Holloway, (2011) Essay writing and referencing guide. www.rhul.ac.uk [accessed 24 April 2012]

The above paragraph (carefully identified as a direct quotation) is taken from:

Royal Holloway School of Management Essay Writing and Referencing Guide

I strongly recommend that you are very familiar with each and every line of this document.

A short example from me using O'Brien, J. (2012) The allure of VW camper vans http://royalhollowaymarketing.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/allure-of-vw-camper-vans.html [accessed 24 April 2012]

You will see in the first paragraph there is a blend of a short quote and some paraphrasing.  The style of the second and third paragraphs could be criticised in an academic submission because they are both rather over reliant on quotations and lack sufficient re-engineering from the author (oops ! that's me...).  Please note all of the ideas have come from research and these are carefully referenced in text before any new ideas are introduced.  Use direct quotation sparingly and make sure you know the two different ways to demonstrate a direct quote (hint: short and long quotes are shown differently).

How to find a good/great/amazing dissertation title ?

How to find a good/great/amazing dissertation title ?

My name is Justin O'Brien  and I thought it might be a worthwhile experience to create a series of blog posts to support the project supervision work I undertake as part of my academic role at Royal Holloway, University of London. 

First up is the requirement to identify a good subject.  Standard advice here suggests you select something that you are interested in, or perhaps passionate about.  This might not be that obvious, particularly at the end of a challenging academic programme.  The dissertation road can be long and hard, having some deeper level of motivation is important.

Other more pragmatic approaches might include starting by working backwards from your career aspriation or perhaps where you have access (through family, friend or work connections) to a company or industry.

There is an opportunity on your CV/resume to include the title of your dissertation (particularly if you got a strong mark) and this can be picked up as a discussion point at interveiw as one of the easy 'warm up' questions.  This may be one of the helpful points of differentiation that makes your application stand out from the crowd. 

Clearly your topic must fit within the scope of your degree, but aside from this constraint, pretty much anything goes.    Thus there are no right or wrong topics, what is crucial is that you are interested in the subject, that there is accessible written material at least in the academic literature and ideally from wider industry too and you can link the conceptual ideas to an appropriate primary research method.

Justin O'Brien

Take a look at past dissertation titles, I have been lucky enough to supervise a very wide range of projects that include topics such as gender differences in UK and Korean computer gaming, ambush marketing at major sports events, differences between UK/Finnish males attitudes towards grooming products, even sex tourism on a Greek island !

Once you have identified an interesting topic you need to find a link between academic theory and the kind of research you will be undertaking.  It makes no sense to link marketing strategy theory to human resources staff retention in a small organisation.  Equally asking 100 undergraduates using a qualitative questionnaire about their experience of being a middle or senior manager shows a clear mis-match in expertise. 

Emotionally the topic selection appears monumental, I have seen many students in very agitated states as they go through this early stage.   Ideas change quickly, as many as 10 different topics can be considered in a few days.  Try not to exhaust your supervisors good will at this stage, use their time when you have settled on a subject area.  Talking to friends and family is helpful, even if it just about articulating your own ideas our loud.  Some people rather panic at this stage.  It is a very large part of your final grade, so perhaps not surprising.    Perhaps rather than over focusing in the early stages on the precise formulation of the title, more focus should be put on undertaking research.  Here I do not mean spending a couple of hours on Google search.

A crucial tip is to spend time using the academic journals accessed via search engines such as EBSCO, Science Direct and Emerald.  Here you will see PhD level and above papers and begin to assimilate useful vocabulary ideas for the title, start to uncover relevant models and theory and also get an understanding of the expected 'academic writing tone' (formal (not slang/spoken English), third person ('the researcher' not I), past tense, evidenced based (using in text references), objective (use shades of grey not black and white, moderated adjectives). 

Be disciplined from the start.  Try to write up paraphrased notes in your own words (note: careful referencing will save panics later) and why not start adding useful papers to your bibliography - I always suggest the creation of a shell document.  Whilst you undertake your research you may feel like you have worked really hard, but have generated absolutely zero words too show for it all !  At least creating a bibliography will give you some measure of progress.  I would expect a good dissertation to have four or more pages of references (double line spaced) that have mostly academic journals, a wide range of texts and some industry sources that may be internet based. 

NEXT TIME: TIPS ON HOW TO WRITE AN EFFECTIVE TITLE