cited at : http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/
Key questions before you embark on writing your essay.
1. Have you identified clearly the key issue the essay question wants scrutinised?
2. Have you checked the command word in the question – e.g. explain means give details about why a certain perspective can be advocated; evaluate means make a critical appraisal of the worth and validity for a particular explanation of how the world seems to work.
3. In the development of your main argument, will you take a particular position that views the key issue from within a certain theoretical perspective? If so, this theory provides you with an analytical ‘tool box’ - (check the different possible ways of thinking about an issue in your course documentation).
How do these particular ways of thinking require you to view the world, especially the nature of relationships between different individuals and groups? Who are the key thinkers in this area?
What evidence do they call upon to support their theories? What predictions are there, in theory, for what you should find as an expression of the issue in different contexts?
4. Maybe, though, you will take two slightly different positions within this overarching perspective (again check your lecture notes for these). Or perhaps you will choose to tackle the question from two contrasting perspectives? If so, is there anything that is common for how the social world is being understood and explained in these differing views? Plus, of course, what is contrastingly different?
Are there contextual factors (isolate them) that cause social institutions or constructs, which are often thought of as having universal meaning, to be experienced differently (e.g., marriage, policing, gender)? Or are the fundamental assumptions in alternative theories about the way the world works so radically distinct from each other that they are presenting completely different models of reality?
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