A swift review: Writing An Assignment
I’ve been looking recently at guides on essay writing - since it’s something that I will both be doing a lot more of very soon, and something I will have to assess in others if everything goes to plan. My local library had Writing an Assignment by Pauline Smith (Amazon UK) in the rat nest that is their non-fiction collection.
It’s a very good guide - the sort I would give to someone trying to figure out how to get by in academic writing. Particularly worthwhile are the exhortations to know thyself - figuring out how one learns and manages time and then using this to reflect on how to do it better. It covers style and tone, although not quite with the level of detail I would have liked. The ‘case studies’ were ever so slightly grating, although not intolerably so.
Until schools teach this kind of basic level of competence to pupils, this book and others like it will be necessary. I guess I’m just a traditionalist fuddy-duddy in wanting schools to adequately prepare those in their care before sending them out into the world.
