Before your dissertation, you likely have other assessments to worry about. If you’re looking for some support for nailing that coursework, keep reading! If you are wanting support with your dissertation, you can find some top tips here.
Assignment writing tips
- Plan your time – give yourself plenty of time to do the work and plan for off days, including illness, lower motivation plus breaks and socialisation. Don’t plan to work flat out for a week when you can give yourself more time and have a good balance with your other commitments, as well.
- Reference as you go – use the Apps suggested above to collect your sources in one place, keep track of tabs and reference as you go, so it’s not stressful at the end when you’re coming to assemble your essay or assignment.
- Use resources to make things easier – if you’re going to be using ChatGPT, make sure you’re using it properly and don’t risk getting accused of plagiarism, learn more about the Uni’s stance here. It can be a great tool to help with essay planning, rephrasing over-complicated sentences or suggesting a structure with good flow for your coursework but never rely on it as the final draft, you’ll only be doing yourself a disservice as AI still cannot compete with your expertise and knowledge.
- Get all your research in one place – make sure you have your sources, research and papers all in one place so you can draw from them easily. If you are a visual learner you can lay out the essay into sections on a mind map and group your sources into topics. Otherwise, a table or brief paragraphs might work, find what’s best for you.
- Make a plan, before you start writing – start by writing a thesis statement, (a few sentences long and answers the question in brief, clear terms by outlining your argument). This forms the central thread of the rest of your essay and helps your keep track of your argument if you get lost. You can also do the same for non-essay subjects to have a clear idea of where you’re going. You can do this for each section of the assignment to help map out where you need to go before you reach the conclusion, don’t be afraid to jump between sections if you don’t work chronologically, just keep a note so you know what’s missing.
- Get feedback from your peers and lecturers – one of the best things you can do to improve your work is to receive regular feedback. Don’t leave it too late so that your lecturer doesn’t have time to look over your early drafts, make sure they can give you feedback and point out any errors or further avenues for exploration early on, to help guide the process. Coursemates and friends can also be great at pointing out useful research you might have missed, finding problems in your arguments or spotting any grammatical errors.
Apps to facilitate your work
- BioRender & other diagram-making sites
If you are a STEM student, diagrams are vital to effective learning. Using visual aids to learn enables better understanding and can help clearly display your results in papers.
BioRender makes visually pleasing yet understandable diagrams but there are other programmes such as Chemix, SmartDraw, and MolView for other scientific backgrounds.
- OneTab
If while you’re researching for your coursework you have 50 different PDFs, papers and websites open, OneTab can be the solution to secure them safely in one place, without clogging up your browser. With a single click, you can select all or some of your tabs to be organised by theme into neat folders. When you need to access these, you can open them again one by one or open all tabs in one folder together.
If you don’t want your laptop to whirr loudly in the library, this one might be worth looking into.
- Slidesgo/Canva for Presentations
If you need to make presentations for group projects, or if they help you to study, Slidesgo and Canva should be your go-tos for making presentations, their built-in templates are far superior to PowerPoint.
- Beanote for WEBSITE notetaking
If you’re looking at lots of papers or websites for sources when you’re researching, it might be arduous to copy sections into a word document and easy to lose track of where you found your sources or why you wanted to share them.
Beanote allows you to highlight passages on a website and add comments on a sticky note – ideal to remind you why you’ve highlighted that passage or quotation. You can also download your annotations as a Word document, HTML or Evernote file to come back to later.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beanote-note-taking-on-we/nikccehomlnjkmgmhnieecolhgdafajb
- Zotero
Writing references can be time consuming but you definitely don’t want to leave it to the last minute and risk forgetting where you found quotes or not having enough time to finish your references properly. Using a reference manager can really help (but make sure you check over them yourself too!)
You can use the personal research assistant Zotero as you go to keep on top of it so that you don’t have to do your referencing in a mad rush at the end, or scramble to find a missing source.
Uni Support
There’s a vast amount of academic and wellbeing support available to you, so make sure you really make the most of it.
- My Learning Essentials’ online resources to help you tackle assignments
- My Learning Essentials’ workshops on tackling assignments
- The Library’s online chat facility, Library chat (see the little yellow box to the right of the screen)
- Academic support resources
- Academic Success Programme can help you brush up on your academic language skills.
- Academic phrasebook for internationally recognised academic writing style Academic-Phrasebank-Sample-PDF-2018.pdf
- Advice on how to avoid mal-practice.
- Mental health support