Academic essays part 10: Developing themes

This series has focused on writing academic essays. Each article has discussed a particular aspect of preparing, reading and writing your essay and each topic has been covered in one page. If you print out or photocopy each of the articles then you will have 10 pages of information that take you through the theory and practicalities of successful essay writing.

The previous nine parts of this series on writing academic essays have covered the common reasons why someone will fail an essay, and how to avoid those mistakes. They highlighted the importance of spending time trying to understand what the question is asking and then shared some ideas on how to plan your answer. They have provided you with practical advice on how to search the literature and then how to read and organise what you extract from the literature. If you follow these guidelines you will achieve at least a basic pass mark.