Word count: 977 SID: 5607088
Identify two elements of academic writing discussed on the module that have been most
relevant and most useful to your writing practice in your subject or discipline.
At the start of university I knew my writing skills were not university standard, this heavily
influenced my decision to choose academic writing for my advantage module to enable me
to write efficiently in my psychology assignments. I always had difficulties writing well, I
never knew what was important to include and ending up writing unnecessary information
and losing marks. I also procrastinate too much, especially since in university the work load
is much less compared to A-Level so I feel as if I can leave work last minute and it turns out
to be a bad decision as I stress and don’t have not enough time to write to the best of my
ability. I learnt through this module that planning is very helpful, as the reason I
procrastinate is because I don’t really know how to start a piece of writing, or I don’t know
what content to write. I see myself as a diver writer (Crème and Lea 2008), meaning I don’t
plan my work I go straight in, which has flaws as I become lost. Planning allows me to have a
structure and to know what to include and helps me know what I’m doing so I don’t
procrastinate. Moreover this module has opened my eyes to other types of writing I didn’t
consider as serious to my course, such as critiquing a summary for example, I learnt how to
summarise a large content by identifying the important information and being able to
critique it. This is helpful for my course as for psychology I need to be able to summarise a
lot of research papers and need to be able to critique the paper so this helped me in my
recent assignments.
The first academic assignment I had to do was titled ‘IQ: hereditary or environmental’. I was
unsure of what I actually had to include in the assignment and what writing techniques I had
to use. I ended up achieving 65% which is more than I expected but there was space for
improvement. The lecturer who marked my work stated ‘there is scope for more critical
evaluation…the lack of which is preventing me from awarding a higher mark.’ The fact that I
could have possibly achieved a first from doing more critical writing depressed me. However
the marker did praise my use of evidence which informs me that my main issue is evaluating
the evidence not presenting it. Throughout my work, the markers feedback suggested that
the main issue he was picking up on was my inability to critically evaluate efficiently. So this
advantage module gave me the correct information, it gave me insight and the ability to
critique well in my next assignment.
I feel the session on critical writing helped me understand and improve my writing
technique and it helped my fully understand critiques. I am grateful I am able to summarise
and critique well because this is a very big part of my psychology course and hopefully this
can now help me boost my marks which has made me more confident when it comes to my
assignments because I know exactly what to do and I know that what I am doing is correct,
therefore I can achieve better grades.
My next issue was report writing, in my first report titled ‘The processing fluency of a harder
font type results in a lower motivation to do said task,’ I only managed to get 58% which
was disappointing. My entire abstract was inaccurate and only achieved 1/3, I was unaware,
Identify two elements of academic writing discussed on the module that have been most
relevant and most useful to your writing practice in your subject or discipline.
At the start of university I knew my writing skills were not university standard, this heavily
influenced my decision to choose academic writing for my advantage module to enable me
to write efficiently in my psychology assignments. I always had difficulties writing well, I
never knew what was important to include and ending up writing unnecessary information
and losing marks. I also procrastinate too much, especially since in university the work load
is much less compared to A-Level so I feel as if I can leave work last minute and it turns out
to be a bad decision as I stress and don’t have not enough time to write to the best of my
ability. I learnt through this module that planning is very helpful, as the reason I
procrastinate is because I don’t really know how to start a piece of writing, or I don’t know
what content to write. I see myself as a diver writer (Crème and Lea 2008), meaning I don’t
plan my work I go straight in, which has flaws as I become lost. Planning allows me to have a
structure and to know what to include and helps me know what I’m doing so I don’t
procrastinate. Moreover this module has opened my eyes to other types of writing I didn’t
consider as serious to my course, such as critiquing a summary for example, I learnt how to
summarise a large content by identifying the important information and being able to
critique it. This is helpful for my course as for psychology I need to be able to summarise a
lot of research papers and need to be able to critique the paper so this helped me in my
recent assignments.
The first academic assignment I had to do was titled ‘IQ: hereditary or environmental’. I was
unsure of what I actually had to include in the assignment and what writing techniques I had
to use. I ended up achieving 65% which is more than I expected but there was space for
improvement. The lecturer who marked my work stated ‘there is scope for more critical
evaluation…the lack of which is preventing me from awarding a higher mark.’ The fact that I
could have possibly achieved a first from doing more critical writing depressed me. However
the marker did praise my use of evidence which informs me that my main issue is evaluating
the evidence not presenting it. Throughout my work, the markers feedback suggested that
the main issue he was picking up on was my inability to critically evaluate efficiently. So this
advantage module gave me the correct information, it gave me insight and the ability to
critique well in my next assignment.
I feel the session on critical writing helped me understand and improve my writing
technique and it helped my fully understand critiques. I am grateful I am able to summarise
and critique well because this is a very big part of my psychology course and hopefully this
can now help me boost my marks which has made me more confident when it comes to my
assignments because I know exactly what to do and I know that what I am doing is correct,
therefore I can achieve better grades.
My next issue was report writing, in my first report titled ‘The processing fluency of a harder
font type results in a lower motivation to do said task,’ I only managed to get 58% which
was disappointing. My entire abstract was inaccurate and only achieved 1/3, I was unaware,
