A
female
age
30-35,
anonymous
writes:I have a feeling that my lectures in college dont like me. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed but I do work, put in a lot more hours than others with study and attend every single lecture unlike the rest of my class. Last week we had to do an assignment and I got the lowest marks going. Everyone else in the class got great feedback as to where they went wrong but all I got was three sentences. "very vague. be more succint. and try more word editing" how am I supposed to learn from my mistakes if the lecturer cant be bothered to explain it to me. I've noticed this has been going on for a while. I've asked for a proper response but not heard anything back. What can I do? Reply to this Question
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reader, anonymous, writes (28 January 2014): OP how much more of an explanation do you need? It sounds like you don't really have a grasp on the basics of writing assignments if you're being vague and they recommend you edit words. You're really not going to find a lecturer who will sit down explain such basic concepts to you.
I bet you 100 bucks your main issue is not answering the question you're asked. Vagueness almost always comes from not directly answering the question but just discussing the topic. The entire assignment has to always go back to the question.
Bring your work to the student help office. There's one in every college or go to one of your classmates who gets top marks and ask them to review your work. You could also ask some of your classmates who got top marks for theirs so you can compare and see how they wrote theirs.
It's not about disliking you, OP, it sounds more like you want them to be like teachers but that's not how it works and there's very little they can do for someone who doesn't get it, if you know what I mean.
OP try and get into the habit of using student support on this kind of stuff. Writing is a craft, with practice you can become better at it. If you're being too vague then you're really not getting the basics of critical analysis right at all and will need help on learning the fundamentals. Lecturers won't teach you that but there are plenty of services in the college which can. I knew people on my Arts course that handed in every assignment to be checked and proofread by either another student or the student help service.
You can go to every lecture, know everything about a subject and still get bad marks if you find it difficult to express that in an assignment.
It is quite easy once you figure out how to be precise though OP. Always answer the question, relate everything back to that and focus on the context. Intro - conclusion have to be linked. I always cheated that slightly and basically just rewrote my intro into the past tense for my conclusion with a bit of padding.
Each paragraph then just has to be about one topic each. The first sentence outlines the topic of the paragraph and the question being asked and each paragraph then should flow logically into the other.
Most importantly though OP it has to answer the question.
For example I'm a history teacher so say I had to write an essay on the assassination of Michael Collins and its effect on Irish politics. First I'd take each word out of that sentence and ask why, when, where, how etc. Effect is the important word there. It;s no use discussing the assassination in general if I don't link everything to the effect.
The logical flow in a history assignment for me is chronological. So I would have to discuss background. Paint a picture of the political landscape while he was alive and the "effect" he had on it then, always relating to the question asked. For me that essay would then be about a comparative analysis of Irish politics while he was alive and after his death. So I would discuss his time in the IRA, his political background, being at odds with de Valera and how he managed to juggle the armed struggle while having his hands tied by DeV. This then would serve as a lead up to the civil war after independence, which sets the scene for his assassination and the aftermath. But again, not just discussing those things but discussing effects in every paragraph. Relating the before and after and always with each paragraph reading back over and seeing whether I was answering the question or it was just waffle.
Maybe you know all this stuff and maybe you think what I'm talking about is unrelated to your subject matter but academic writing is all the same. You have to have sources for everything and you have to answer what you're asked and not just give a general story of what happened or what the subject is. It would do me no good just write out all the events of Collin's death, it would also do me no good not to have solid points. Whenever you read back over a paragraph you have to see the point your making, the question asked in it and the answer given. Otherwise you just get nothing.
A
female
reader, anonymous, writes (28 January 2014): Hi, I've bumped into this site first time ever and picked up your letter. I'm Italian writing from Italy. I don't know if this can help, but it worked for me: when I attended university we had to pass an English composition before being allowed to sit the oral exam. We had several mock tests and my composition was among the weakest, hardly had a chance to make me pass. Before trying my third mock, I asked 2 or 3 mates to show me their mock composition (which had been assessed among the best) and immediately understood what the professor meant by "well done/perfect/ok". So, ask your mates (the best ones) to show you their papers. You can learn more from there rather than from lectures on how to do things. Hope it can be useful. Bye. Daniela
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