About this Resource
Productive reading
Writing effectively
Who are you trying to convince?
Putting yourself in your assessor’s place
Identifying explicit criteria underlying audience feedback
Looking for feedback on what you are doing well and what needs improving
Feedback prompt list: reinforcing the good and avoiding the weak
Identifying the implicit criteria underlying audience feedback
Expanding what you learn from audience feedback
Familiarising yourself with the official criteria for assessment
Learning systematically from audience feedback
Learning from your writing for formative and summative assessment
Formative and summative assessment in writing for academic presentation
Criteria for academic presentation and developing a convincing argument
Comparing criteria for academic publication and assessing students’ work
Who needs convincing if your work is to get published in an academic journal?
Inside an academic journal editor’s world
Getting to grips with academic journal criteria for acceptance
Building your sense of audience: an interview with a journal editor
Top tips for postgraduate and doctoral research students who aspire to get published
Arguing convincingly
Mapping your field
Literature reviewing
Reviewing the literature systematically
Developing proposals

Putting yourself in your assessor's place

Consider the piece of academic writing that you are currently doing, or will be doing next. Suppose it is for your postgraduate studies tutor or your dissertation or thesis supervisor.

Now imagine that you are your tutor or supervisor. In your imaginary role as tutor or supervisor you have just received this piece of academic writing to read and you will be giving feedback to the writer. Try working out what you are looking for.

In your imagined role as the tutor or supervisor of the writer, provide answers to these questions:

  1. What task has the writer tried to achieve in producing this piece of writing?

 
  1. What criteria are you using to assess how well the writer has achieved the task?

 
  1. Have these criteria have been set out in any document or website available to the writer?

 
  1. If you also use implicit criteria based on your view of good practice as an experienced and expert management researcher, what are they?

 
  1. How well has the writer achieved the task according to the criteria you are using?

 
  1. How important is it to you that the writing is clear and the presentation good enough for you to understand what the writer is trying to communicate to you?

 
  1. Can you identify what the writer’s overall argument is about the topic?

 
  1. How convinced are you by the writer’s overall argument, and why or why not?

 
  1. Could this piece of writing be improved, and if so how?

 
  1. What feedback will you be giving to the writer?

 

Now step back into your real role as a postgraduate or research student.

The exercise of imagining what your audience is looking for will probably have given you some clues about what you can do to meet the expectations of your assessors as fully as you can. Try getting into the habit of: 

    • doing this ‘thought experiment’ every time you start on a new written task which is to be assessed
    • repeating the exercise before you submit your written work for assessment as part of your final checking to ensure that it is as good as you can make it

To download and use this document – click  here