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Success at Master's Level

Improve your postgraduate academic skills, with tips on critical reading, clearer arguments, addressing complexity, and writing with authority.

Addressing complexity

Analysis and Evaluation

Stronger arguments involve higher order thinking; this means you need to bring all your critical faculties to bear on the issue, including analysis and evaluation.

To think and write critically you need to minimise description (simply presenting facts) and make good use of both analysis and evaluation.

Analysis considers the constituent parts, the essential features, or ways in which you can break down more complex topics to understand them. In academic writing you are often identifying the contributory factors to situations.

However, it’s not enough to simply explore constituent parts of topics; we also need to evaluate them, which means exploring strengths and weaknesses or exploring how the parts interact with each other or a different context.  They may also need different weightings to inform a considered understanding.

Complex considerations

Consideration of complexity can be used to make your argument more robust: 

A tessellation of the six aspects which contribute to robust arguments. Continue to find out more.

Robust Arguments

Find out more: Click each heading in turn to find out how you can build stronger arguments by considering the factors listed here:

Risks and liabilities

At the simplest, you can simply outline the risks with a single decision or recommendation. However, also consider the interconnection of risks and how you decide to minimise risks in complex decisions or strategies; all options may have risky consequences.

Probability of success

Rather than just suggesting recommendations, you might add more tone to your argument by offering some estimation about the probability of success. Can you predict any confounding factors, the spanner in the works that can scupper a well-made strategy? Perhaps you can offer some view on how useful, or transferable the suggestions you make are. Are they limited to specific groups, settings, populations?

Barriers to success

Theory is all very well. However, advances in theoretical human knowledge may need to be turned into local plans, strategies and implemented by people. Plans often fail in the implementation. Judge what could be problematic, complex or what could go wrong. Adopt a questioning approach and examine assumptions. Can you draw any parallels with other implementation of projects that can be learned from? In some subject areas this could be an appropriate point to bring in your personal knowledge of a setting or industry (but check the assignment criteria to assess if a subjective voice is appropriate).

Stakeholder perspectives

Think about who is consuming a product, knowledge, or plans. Has research taken into account all actors and perspectives? Have any individuals been excluded? Think of social diversity; will the ideas/ suggestions work for all? If not, why not? What else can be put in place? Consider fairness and ethics - have all the expectations of any recipients and beneficiaries been addressed?

Constraints

What factors impact on the relevance and significance of the evidence? You could make links to practice, or consider key constraints. For example, knowledge is time-bound. Is there a time-window that makes the argument relevant/ irrelevant?

Costs - in the widest sense

Arguments may be purely theoretical, but on applied courses there are often costs (human and financial) to recommendations or certain plans of action. Costs in the broadest sense include individual and social costs, and also ‘opportunity costs’ (the cost of missing out on a different opportunity). Consider up-front initial costs and down-the-line costs. What could be the costs if there are mistakes or flaws or if things go wrong? Many strategies are not neutral. What appears to be a solution could create more further problems or unintended consequences in the future. You deploy critical thinking if you foresee such issues.

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