Diagnostic writing

This is the first piece of writing we will do on the Language and Study Skills module. It is not assessed, and is used by your teacher to get a picture of your writing style at the moment. We may refer back to this essay and redraft parts of it to practice the skills we’re studying in class.

General guidelines

Over the two terms we'll be looking at four important aspects of good academic writing, so you can start thinking about them now.

• Content - make sure that what you write is relevant to the topic and answers the question.
• Organisation - aim to make your writing as organised and as easy to follow as possible.
• Language - do you have a good range and level of accuracy in terms of grammar and vocabulary?
• Referencing - showing evidence of reading on the topic is essential for any piece of academic writing. However, just for today we're not going to worry about that, and are just focusing on the three points above.