Mewburn Inger - Level up Your Essays

I NGER M EWBURN is the Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University and creator of the popular blog The Thesis Whisperer, where she gives advice to PhD students. Inger is the author of How to Tame Your PhD, How to be an Academic and Becoming an Academic, and co-author with Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann of How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble.

K ATHERINE F IRTH manages learning programs for undergraduates and graduates in university settings, and has been developing students as writers for more than a decade. She runs writing workshops for doctoral students including helping to found the Thesis Boot Camp program. Katherine currently runs the academic program at International House, a college of the University of Melbourne. She is co-author of Your PhD Survival Guide and gives writing advice on her blog Research Degree Insiders.

S HAUN L EHMANN is currently an Academic Language and Learning Facilitator at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Previously he taught academic skills and writing at the Australian National University, lectured in anthropology and human genetics, and was a teacher of English as a second/additional language in Japan.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann 2021

First published 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN9781742236803 (paperback)

9781742245126 (ebook)

9781742249643 (ePDF)

Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Printer Ligare

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

HOW TO GET BETTER
GRADES AT UNIVERSITY

INGER MEWBURN//KATHERINE FIRTH//SHAUN LEHMANN

This is the second book on writing that the authors have done together. Our previous book, How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble, was written for PhD students and working academics. People loved that book and immediately asked us to share our ideas for people just starting at university. Level Up Your Essays is the result.

How do you feel when you work hard on an essay but dont get the mark you want? You might feel dispirited, demotivated, even depressed. For your next essay you might work even harder, way harder than your classmates, and still might not see an improvement in your grades.

We are here to tell you: working hard is important, but so is working smarter.

This book shows you how to write a better university essay: one that earns you the marks you deserve for all your hard work. This book is for anyone who needs to write essays in the arts, sciences and professional disciplines, and wants to improve their academic results.

You may feel you are doing everything right in your university studies. You might be doing all the reading and spending hours on your essays, but at the end of semester find your grades are still disappointing. There are lots of reasons why someone like you might pick up a book like this, from just wanting to get an idea of what is expected from universitylevel essay writing, to needing to get good grades so you can go on to the postgraduate or professional pathway of your dreams. You might have already had a grade you didnt feel reflected the work you put in, or you might feel like everyone else just gets it and you dont. Its never too early or too late to read this book and benefit from it!

Whats more, the challenges you are facing are more common than you think.

If you are motivated enough to pick up this book and read it, you are committed and willing to put in the work. Youre already at university, so you already have the capacity to succeed.

The piece of the puzzle youre missing is that university essays are different from other kinds of writing you have learned to do. Once you understand how and why they are different you will be better placed to write a great essay. In this book we will show you some tools and techniques that will help you achieve the results you want.

You might have been told you were a good writer in high school. If you have been in the workforce before starting university, you might have been praised for your neat reports and concise briefing notes. Some of you might have taken the huge step of moving away from your home country to study in Australia. Different countries teach different styles of writing; what worked at home might not work in Australia.

If you are not getting good grades in university, its often a sign you need to move beyond a high schoolstyle of academic writing. Unfortunately, the way you were taught to write before university does not produce the kind of essays that get a Distinction, or higher, at university. (A Distinction grade is sometimes called a H2A, B+ or 2.1; its the grade you usually need to go on to postgraduate study.)

The disconnect between high schoolstyle essays and those you are asked to write at university is a well-known problem. So well-known, in fact, that a whole profession of experts, like ourselves, exists to help you make the transition.

We called this book Level Up Your Essays partly because some of us love video games and mostly because we like the sentiment. To level up means that your efforts in a game have been rewarded. Grinding means doing the same thing over and over, in exactly the same way; it is boring and doesnt help you make progress fast. Instead, to make faster progress, you need to do things differently. When you go up a level you get shiny stars and a different, more rewarding gaming experience. Going up a level always feels great, especially if you have worked hard for it. Levelling up in a game gives you access to new weapons, new armour and more difficult boss fights. Levelling up in your writing will give you better grades, and access to higher degrees and more job opportunities.

In this book we show you the hidden rules that your university lecturers know about writing but fail to tell you. Your teachers dont hide this information deliberately; mostly they have just forgotten what its like to be a beginner. Sometimes they give you plenty of feedback to help you improve, but the feedback may not make much sense to you. Giving practical feedback is a complex task and most of your university lecturers are content-matter experts, not writing experts. (In this book, well use the word lecturer to mean the person who teaches you and marks your work. At your university, that person could also be called a tutor, supervisor, lab leader, advisor or teaching assistant.)