Education: Essay Writing & Study Coach Workbooks

Study Coach providing you with educational tips for essay writing, dissertation writing. Helping learners to acquire knowledge and academic skills. Workbooks by Study Coach available at Amazon, author: Morel Benard. The workbooks are a great resource for Homeschooling and Lifelong Learning, providing learners with knowledge, lots of fun to be had, games/puzzles and answers can be found at the end of each book. See Morel’s author page at Amazon: 

https://www.amazon.com/author/morelbenard

Essay Writing 

If you have recently started a new college/university course, then soon you will need to start thinking about writing assignments. “Hooray, Hooray” I hear you say, “Bring it on” (just kidding). Well, what do I know, you might in fact love researching and engaging with academic work, you are an academic nerd. But, if this is not you, if the thought of writing an assignment fills you with dread, don’t worry, I’m going to offer you some tips. If you have to write a report for work, you might also find the tips to be of some use. 

There is much to say about Essay Writing, for example: note taking, note making, debunking the essay title, gathering evidence, structuring and so much more, but I’m choosing to focus on raising discursive content and reducing descriptive writing plus referencing. 

Aim to raise a discussion and not simply to regurgitate the researcher’s words. Essays, including reflective assignments should be a discursive piece of work. 

To raise discursive writing you will need to use some thinking skills and raise issues. The best way to express what I mean by ‘thinking skills’ is to encourage you (my readers) to mentally pose questions and offer yourself some suggestions, give reasoning to support the suggestions and furthermore support with some research evidence. 

Example: Essay Title: Team Work Makes the Dream Work

You might agree that team work makes the dream work, and you might be tempted to write: “Yes, I agree” – this would however be a very poor essay. I know that you can do better that that, so no doubt you will do some reading and provide a couple of definitions for the concept of ‘team work’ and provide the reference for the definitions. You might even compare the definitions and highlight any differences.

To become discursive, you could use some thinking skills and consider:

Potential barriers to effective team work

Role of players/staff and impact on team work

A business/service where team work would prove to be a hindrance

Managers influence on team work

Gender influence on team work and so on

I know that the title doesn’t mention, barriers, staff, managers, gender, etcetera,  but this is your job to probe behind the title, to raise questions relating to the title and to provide possible answers, and to support the suggestions with research. For example if you find a research article by Blogs and Blogs (2022) stating that businesses delivering personal services have difficulties with ‘team work’ because of a confidentiality clause, then present this issue and enlighten your readers/marker. You could even make a suggestion of how personal services/businesses could overcome the problem. 

That’s all for now

WorkBooks:

Activity Books for Learning, providing knowledge, games/quizzes, available at Amazon. Lots of titles to choose from. Author: yours truly Morel Benard.  Recent publication – Storytelling: The Birds English WorkBook

Do take a look https://www.amazon.com/author/morelbenard