Introduction

Writing, like speech, is a form of communication, an attempt to convey meaning. To be an effective communicator you have to speak or write in a way that the people who hear or read your words will understand; and therefore you have to ask yourself, ‘who is my audience?’.

Most of the time, when you speak or write you will naturally use language which is appropriate for your audience. If you are chatting informally with friends you do not speak in the same way as you would if you were presenting a seminar paper in class or presenting an argument to the court. If you are writing a letter of complaint to a business organisation, you approach it quite differently from the task of writing a brief note to a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Much of the written work you produce as a student will be assessed and the audience will be your lecturers and tutors. Your language and style must both be appropriate to this academic context. This means that your arguments must not only be logical, coherent and supported by authority, but also that you must present them in an impersonal way.

Expanding for a moment on the need for impersonal presentation, a lawyer addressing a court would never say, ‘I believe my client should win this appeal’, but would adopt the more impersonal style of ‘I submit that the law in this appeal is all in favour of my client’, before going on to cite the authorities which would enable the court to agree. And you should present your essays in the same style. So, for example, if you consider an outcome to be unfair, you must construct an argument to show why it is unfair, drawing on examples from sources such as dissenting judgments and academic criticism of the relevant law. What you should never do is simply say ‘I think this outcome is unfair’.

Clarity and accuracy should be your aims in all your writing, but these are not always easy goals to reach.

If you have not written in this way before, you may find it an uphill struggle in the early stages of your studies. However, it is a skill you need to master, since you will find that until you can write in a coherent, academic style, the real merit of your arguments will often go unappreciated. Crucially, this will be reflected in your marks, because examiners cannot know whether a muddled piece of work represents clear understanding that has been poorly presented, or poor understanding that has been clearly presented. From the point of view of assessment, however, this distinction is unimportant, because neither will be given a good mark.

As well as being clear, your writing should follow a consistent system of footnoting and referencing. Your lecturers and tutors will probably have a preferred system and you may be obliged to use that. You must be rigorous in citing your sources and providing references to all the materials you have used when preparing your work. This is not only good academic practice in its own right, but is also essential if you are to avoid allegations of plagiarism, or to put it another way, academic dishonesty, or – to put it even more bluntly – cheating.