This resource has been designed specifically for MML students writing Literature essays. It is an important supplement to the work you do on the ‘content’ side of your MML papers.
Writing good supervision essays helps you to understand your course material better, and to make the best use of your supervision time. Learning to write well means learning to think more effectively, to perceive the relationships between different ideas more clearly, and to approach your subject in a more precise way. Improving your writing skills will lead to progress in many other aspects of your work..
You can also access separate resources for History writing and Linguistics writing.
Supervisors should access the materials on this parallel site which contains PDFs for downloading and teaching notes.
This resource was designed by Dr Joanna Page. (Feedback is welcome: contact me on jep29@cam.ac.uk.)
Some material was adapted from: http://www.rlf.org.uk; http://www.aucegypt.edu/academic/writers and http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/.
How to use this resource
The best way to use this material may be to ask your Director of Studies, or a supervisor, to go through it with you in a seminar class of 6-8 students. Supervisors can access a different version of this site and download PDF files containing exercises and questions for group discussion. You may learn more if you use the material in this way.
If you prefer to go through the material individually, or wish to revise points you have already covered in group discussion, clicking on the links on the navigation panel will take you to different parts of the resource. There are a variety of exercises to help you focus on the skills involved in writing an essay. To get the most out of the material, make sure you think about the questions yourself before clicking to find out the suggested answers. You could do the exercises with another MML student and compare answers. You can also go straight to some sections using the FAQs below: