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Planning and Structuring Assignments

This guide addresses key aspects of planning your work, getting started, making sense of assessment criteria, and templates for structures and paragraphs.

Structuring your answer

Now that you’ve completed your reading, it’s time to structure your writing:

  1. Establish links between different parts of your reading through mind-mapping or identifying common themes.
  2. Create headings to organise your links – these will become the basis for your paragraphs.
  3. Start to structure these headings into a logical order and consider how you will order and use these examples to construct and support your response to the assignment.
  4. There are several different ways you can structure your response, and this might be dependant on what your assignment is asking you to do. For example, if your assignment is organised around themes it might be structured something like this:

Introduction (about 10% of the total word count)

  • Introduce topics, key terms, debates

Theme 1 (about 30% of the word count)

  • Explanation
  • Evidence for
  • Evidence against
  • Evaluation/discussion

Theme 2 (about 30% of the word count)

  • Explanation
  • Evidence for
  • Evidence against
  • Evaluation/discussion

Theme 3 (about 20% of the word count)

  • Explanation
  • Evidence for
  • Evidence against
  • Evaluation/discussion

Conclusion (about 10% of the word count)

  • Summary of main points
  • Future directions
     


Alternatively, if you were contrasting two theories it might look like this:

General introduction to theory A and B (about 10% of the word count)

  • Introduce topics, key terms, debates between the theories

Theory A (about 30% of the word count)

  • Overview
  • Evidence for/against
  • Evaluation/discussion

Theory B (about 30% of the word count)

  • Overview
  • Evidence for/against
  • Evaluation/discussion

Synthesis section comparing relative strengths and weaknesses of both theories (about 20% of the word count)

Conclusion

  • Summary of main points
  • Future directions

Of course, these aren’t the only ways to structure your writing and it’s likely that you will need to adapt your plan for each assignment depending on what is required. However, remember that a plan should always help to organise your content so that your response is clear, coherent and well-structured.


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