Essay

BZ1004 Short Essay 2012

Read this whole document (4 pages, including the mark sheet) (a) before starting and (b) before submitting your essay

General Instructions

Your assignment is to write a short essay, suitable for a scientific audience, on one of the topics below. The purpose of the exercise is for you to demonstrate your ability to bring together relevant scientific facts and concepts and then express them in a logical and coherent composition, using appropriate and correct scientific language, English expression, grammar and punctuation.

Aim to have a short introductory paragraph, which explains what the essay is about; a few main paragraphs that develop the theme; and a short concluding paragraph. It would be possible to write thousands of words on each of the topics below. The real skill is in choosing which particular aspects to write about and which examples to use in a short essay. A second skill is following these instructions properly!

Maximum number of words – 500. You will be penalised for more than this number – remember that a few great words are much better than a lot of mediocre ones.

Given the shortness of this essay, you may pick a subset of the material to consider – but you should explain why you chose a particularly subset. For example, for a question on parasitism you might decide to concentrate on only one phylum – but you would need to justify this approach and be sure that the chosen subset of information provided sufficient scope to address the topic adequately.

You should give examples wherever possible and use diagrams to illustrate points only if necessary. Further instructions on essay writing are attached, and an example of the marking sheet we will use is also appended.

Be aware of what is meant by plagiarism and avoid it – It is possible to plagiarise quite unintentionally, but we have safeguards in place to check on inadvertent or willful plagiarism: electronic submission allows...