Essay-based assessments might be some of the most relaxed of those that we face within our Life Sciences degrees, but they can still be truly challenging and require a lot of hard work. Read our top tips for essay writing here. 

Sometimes, essays can be relatively easy to write – if you know the topic well, know where to find the right resources and have an excellent understanding of the question, they can be written in a relatively relaxed state of mind. However, if you struggle with the topic, or if English isn’t your first language, essay writing can become a little bit trickier. Here are our top tips for approaching the essay-based assessments, along with some great resources to check out before you start. 

Our top ten tips

1. Structure your time and start early. Most essay based assessments give you four weeks to complete. If you use all of this time, you don’t need dread the frantic all-nighter the day before the deadline. Try allocating a certain number of hours to the essay per day – then, overlay a general time structure for yourself. As a rough guide, you should spend one week reading, finding resources and familiarising yourself with the topic; one week planning and selecting content to discuss from these resources; one and half weeks writing the essay and the final half-week refining and proof reading. 
2. Start with the basics. If you’re struggling to understand the essay content, there is no shame with taking it back to basics. Read back over your notes, rewatch lectures, make sure you understand all the key words – even reading a Wikipedia page can help give you a firm understanding of the essay topic. This then gives you a foundation to add to, and will make it much easier to find relevant sources.
3. Understand the question. In any essay writing, it is key that you answer the question you have been given. If you don’t fully understand what the question is asking, you risk writing an irrelevant answer. Splitting the question into parts can help clarify any possible structures, and ensure that you now how to cover all the components.
4. Look at your feedback. Looking at past mistakes is very valuable in learning, and this is especially true of essay writing. Check out your feedback from previous essays; make note of what you did well and what you struggled with, and try to bear this feedback in mind as you are writing.
5. Structure your writing. The quality of your structure can be the make-or-break of the essay. One way to ensure that your essay structure works well is to organise each paragraph into a mini-essay. Make a point, support it by evidence, explain what the evidence means, then criticise it if possible. Conclude this mini-essay by readdressing both the point made at the beginning of the paragraph, and underline how the point made answers the question.
6. Support with evidence. Whatever you write about, it is vital that you back up all the points you make with evidence. When you are planning your essay, make sure you draw evidence from your sources and add it to each point. A good rule to follow is that if you can’t back up a point, you probably shouldn’t be making it.
7. Try to include critical insight. High scoring essays include critical insight. There are lots of different ways you can do this. You can directly critique evidence, for example, highlighting the constraints in a method used, or underlining the limited scope of a study. Or, you can try to find a controversy within the literature, and use this to compare two sets of evidence, and evaluate which is more convincing.
8. Make a strong conclusion. A strong conclusion can add the icing on your essay ‘cake’. Try to briefly revisit each point you made and discuss the ‘overall’ answer to the question. Don’t introduce any new points! Try instead to point to where there may be gaps in the research on the topic, and discuss how these could be remedied in the future. Explain how this would help answer the question and add to insight into the field.
9. Use the mark-scheme. When you have finished your essay, read through it with the FLS mark-scheme. Work through at each level and try to ensure that you have met the marking criteria. Where you haven’t, try to rework what you have written until you feel it meets the mark-scheme more definitely. Then, move on. Don’t spend too long on this – it’s just a case of refining, and if you don’t want to undo the hard work you’ve already done.
10. Proof read, proof read, proof read! Yes, really – three times over! Reading your work in different formats (for example, typed and printed out) can help you catch mistakes. Give your work to a friend who doesn’t know lots about the topic for proofreading, as they can check spelling and sentence structure with an objective view and less focus on the content. Using proof-reading programmes such as ‘Grammarly’ help you catch spelling and grammar mistakes, and ensure the readability of the essay. Finally, make sure your essay and references are formatted according to the guidance given on the module Moodle page or by the module lead.

Resources

Essay writing is always easier with a bit of help. Here are some links to additional guides and resources that you might find useful.

• Grammarly – a spelling and grammar checking software. A free version is available.
• UCL’s referencing guide, links to Mendeley, Zotero and MyBib