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Who are you trying to convince? Much of the academic writing you do as a postgraduate or research student (or as an academic researcher) isn’t just for you. You are often writing for someone else. You’ve got an audience to satisfy! Writing as part of the two-way process of academic discourse means writing to be read by others. You produce your written account of some aspect of your studies for your assessors. They read it critically and assess it, typically with reference to specified criteria, to see what you have learned. You may then receive verbal or written feedback indicating how well your work has met these criteria. Feedback may be designed to help you improve your account, perhaps given during a tutorial or sent to you as written annotations on your draft. But it may be designed to let you know how well your submitted work has met the assessment criteria, as with your examination grade or the verbal report you receive on your thesis at the end of the viva examination. So academic writing for assessment is never just about what you have to say on a management or research methods topic. It is always also about demonstrating to the critical readers making up your audience that your work has met their assessment criteria. Typically, the criteria require you to communicate a convincing argument about the topic at hand. Therefore, before you start on a piece of writing for assessment, it’s worth making sure that you know:
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