To what extent is aggression innate or learned behaviour? Discuss evidence for both arguments, to provide an informed conclusion.
INTRODUCTION
Outlines the issues and/or position you are arguing for. Your grade will reflect how clearly and completely the argument is outlined.
BODY OF ESSAY
Relevance and understanding
All information in your essay should be relevant to the question you have been asked. There should be examples that clearly illustrate a theory, model or approach to understanding the topic.
Discussion and Critique
You should include a clear discussion often where two or more opposing approaches, theories or pieces of evidence are evaluated. Your critique should be supported by citations.
CONCLUSION
Your conclusion will draw on the threads of your argument together and link back to your original outline of what you said you would do in the Introduction. By the end of the Discussion you will have answered the question posed in the essay title.
ADVICE:
The aim of the essay is to apply what you have learned in lectures, tutorials and in your readings to everyday life. The essay should therefore explain and evaluate theories and evidence you have come across. Be careful of including lots of theories or concepts as your essay may end up looking like a kind of list. However, if you just pick one or two you won’t have the chance to show off how much you know.
Your introduction should set out how you will be tackling the essay question – i.e., your thesis – what you are arguing for.
Most typical comments from previous years:
• Do not simply list studies. For example, too often we see “A&B (Year) conducted a study to look at [TOPIC] and found that [RESULT]. C&D (Year) also looked at this, and found similar results…”. You should provide a detailed critical review of the A&B study – their rationale, hypotheses, methods, results, discussion, before going on to do the same thing for C&D, possibly in a new paragraph.
• Most comments referred to aspects that were poorly written and unclear.
• Next came the use of examples: some did not seem to relate well to the theories being discussed or how they related was not made clear.
• The thread of the argument gets lost – there is no flow to the argument so the reader can’t follow where the essay is going.
In-text references aren’t in the Reference section and vice versa
• No evidence of any research having been carried out to write the essay.
• Lots of theories but very little use of examples to illustrate them or lots of examples and very little theory.
• Make sure that by the end of the essay you have clearly answered the essay question. Try to relate each piece of evidence back to the specific essay question asked – do not just write about everything you can find on the topic.
