2. Rationale for using How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays: Content

Writing for academic study requires processes, skills and styles that are different from other types of writing, and which present students with several challenges. Firstly, students might for the first time be trying to write not about their own views on tangible experiences but about other people’s views on often abstract concepts. The hub around which most academic work revolves is the critical reinterpretation and reformulation of ideas and information, and it is easy for tutors to underestimate or forget the enormity and difficulty for students of understanding their reading in their own way, expressing their understanding in their writing, and then using their interpretation in the construction of their own argument.

Secondly, students have an almost infinite amount and diversity of online information available to them, making it difficult to select appropriate and relevant material. Moreover, the quality of website content is variable, and its provenance and authorship increasingly hard to determine, yet easy to cut and paste into the student’s own work without detailed comprehension and/or analysis and without adequate citation.

Thirdly, another consequence of e-technology is that although students might write/text a great deal on social media platforms, they might still be unfamiliar with the more formal lexis and grammar needed to communicate complex ideas, knowledge and arguments clearly and precisely in an academic context. Some students will therefore be novices when it comes to reading complex and extended texts, making notes and writing extended pieces.

These three factors may result in a lack of experience and knowledge in what constitutes good scholarship (particularly why and how to use source material constructively and correctly), a lack of ability to write clearly at sentence and paragraph level, and a lack of appropriate vocabulary. Students thus sometimes stray accidentally into plagiarism due to inadequate referencing and/or copying of vocabulary or phrasing from source material.

How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays engenders formative learning in the above areas, giving students accessible insight into, and practice of, the whole process of writing successfully in an academic context, from searching for source material to producing a finished piece or writing. The overarching aim of the book is to help students succeed in executing an essential and complex element of graduateness; how to use their reading in their essays.