Some Tips for Writing Your Essay

Some tips for writing your essay

This is not a comprehensive guide to writing an essay. Rather, it gives some

guidance on issues that tend to cause problems for students.

Researching the topic:

In researching the topic you should read widely across a range of references and resources. If you base your work around the arguments given in one paper, you will probably receive quite a low mark. Higher marks will be given where you have successfully combined material from a number of sources.

Try to make sure that the sources you use are reliable. There is a vast amount of material available on the web and much of it is very useful. However, there are few quality controls. Do make use of published academic papers. These have all gone through a ‘refereeing’ process designed to ensure the analysis and conclusions are robust. You can then supplement material from these papers with examples from more informal sources.

Writing up your work:

The nature of most essay topics is such that there is no single ‘correct’ answer. What we are looking for is relevant and logically argued discussions, supported by appropriate evidence. Evidence includes statistics, examples and arguments from previously published research. Consider the following two pieces of text, making similar points:

‘One idea is that investment banks use their superior information to exploit

issuers. They underprice issues to make their own jobs easier. However, I don’t think this is very convincing because it is hard to believe issuers would let banks do that.’

and

‘Baron (1982) argues that investment banks use their superior information to

exploit issuers. They underprice issues to make their own jobs easier. However, Muscarella and Vesuypens (1989) cast doubt on this theory by showing that investment banks also underprice their own IPOs.’

Which text is more powerful and convincing? The second one makes use of

previous published research in order to support the argument and, as a...