Student's Page

We are always ready to help you with your essays. Our role here is to give advice and guidance so that you can develop successful essay writing skills and practices. We hope these will sustain you over a range of modules, and across the years you spend at Kent.

Essay writing is a very popular area for academic advice and guidance. Many of our students comment on the way their grades improve once they seek advice; but this improvement takes place over time, and through your efforts. There are no instant solutions, but much we can say about good essay writing techniques.

In general, we feel our guidance rests upon sensible recognition of clear boundaries between ourselves, students and departments. Therefore, we think it's important to define some of these boundaries on our web site.

Preparing & Planning Essay :

What we can do ... What we cannot do ...
  • Help you understand the essay title
  • Discuss the academic content of your essay
  • Help you plan your essay
  • Make judgements about your ideas and sources
  • Provide guidance on successful reading/note-taking techniques
  • Evaluate your reading material, or suggest further reading
  • Help you manage the reading load
  
  • Guide you in writing your literature review
  
  • Help you with time-management
  

Draft Essays:

What we can do ... What we cannot do ...
  • Help you organise/structure your essay by discussing-
    • Overall structure
    • Paragraph and sentence structure
  • Re-write any of your essay
  • Give you an opportunity to clarify your ideas
  • Select evidence for you
  • Help you write in an academic style
  • Correct citations and references across the whole of a document
  • Help you reference effectively to avoid plagiarism.
  • Proof-read your document
  • Help you with grammar, spelling and punctuation on a section of your writing
  

Post-Submission:

What we can do ... What we cannot do ...
  • Help you to learn from feed-back
  • Re-mark your essay
 
  • Challenge your final grade
 
  • Enter into any kind of dispute between you and your department