Academic Writing with Peter Thomas

This morning as part of our twilight group zoom meeting, Peter Thomas who is part of the Learning Enhancement team at Middlesex University joined us to discuss Analytical writing. This is obviously something that is extremely important for Module 3 which concludes with an analytical written report on our chosen inquiry. 

Peter defined the structure for a theme-based piece as this:

Introduction- This should be roughly 10% of your written report. 

What? What am I going to be discussing throughout my report and what areas shall I be examining. 

Why? Why am I looking into my chosen inquiry.

How? How am I going to be looking into this. What methods will I be using throughout this piece. 

Context- 

This is where we define our key themes for the reader. We also give an overview about background examples here. In Module 3 our Literature Review will fall into this section. It will give an overview of what we are looking at throughout the pieces. 

Analysis-

Here we use our chosen key themes and then take multiple examples from literature, interviews and personal experience to analyse with the theme. This gives comparative reading to the reader. 

Conclusion-

The last section wraps up the whole report. You use this section to share what you found out and what this all means. You then go on to explain why this is interesting and relevant to your inquiry and personal practice. Draw your argument together in this last section and show the relevance of the analysis.

I will definitely be using this structure to aid my analytical report writing process.