Instruction Words In Essay Questions

Student insights are expected and arguments must be justified. In such statements, details are not necessarily required, but briefly cite the boundaries or limitations of the definition.

Remeber the 'class' to which a things belongs and whatever differentiates the particular object from all others in that class.

These are the words that tell you what your essay should do.

It is important that you understand exactly what these words mean so that you don't misinterpret a question.

It usually calls for the kind of argument where opposing lists of points are presented and compared in order to facilitate an overall judgement (see 168. It is quite often placed at the end of a question, like this: This essay would require manufacturing and agriculture to be separately analysed for the likely benefits and problems that expanding each would bring to Africa, and then would have to use these in judging the truth of the statement in the question.

Alternative answers would range from “the statement is true” to “the statement is false”, with such intermediates as “mainly true” and “partly true”.Other posts within this blog that are particularly relevant to essay-writing are 24. Question (a) above does not allow different correct answers – only a single process is implied to exist – whereas (b) allows a range from “not important at all” to “essential”.The “correct” answer could be anywhere within this range – and it can vary from student to student. With this in mind, the reader might like to try identifying the analytic essays required by the following: The questions requiring analysis here are (d), (e) and (g).Question (f) does not require analysis because no judgement of importance is required; the wording already implies that the importance is great, and the essay simply has to say how.Here is a moderately complete list of essay instruction words.In (d) the alternative answers range from “not successful” to “wholly successful” (with such intermediates as “quite successful”); in (e) they are “not useful” to “essential”; while in (g) they are “identical” to “completely different”.Questions like (g) are particularly notable: it is not enough to list similarity/difference.As a result, they present a vocabulary-learning challenge to students whose mother tongue is not English. In other words, it requires argumentation (see 167. This difference leads essays like (a) to be called “descriptive”, those like (b) “analytic”.In addition, these words sometimes differ from each other in very subtle ways, with the result that nearly all students suffer some uncertainties about them. Analytic essays are very commonly required in higher education. You then have to figure out how to present those facts in a convincing and systematic argument. But the silver lining here is that presenting your argument doesn’t have to be stressful. Essays first require copious amounts of background reading and research so you can include accurate facts in your writing.