Making Your Essay Assignment Stand Out: Presentation Skills
Even after attempting your best, you might often find your grades in essay writing assignments or coursework unjustifiable. Unlike attempting multiple choice questions, writing an essay for an exam requires as much skills in presentation as in content formation.
The layout and structure of your essay determines your grades to a large extent. When examining subjective papers or coursework, it is not feasible for examiners to completely read through the essays of each and every student. There are chances of an examiner missing the important information if the facts are not properly presented. The foremost task of a student therefore is to make his/her essay assignment reader friendly.
A presentable and reader friendly essay assignment or coursework will have a higher chances of being graded well than a poorly presented one, regardless of the content. A mere physical positioning and appearance of text on the page can help the reader considerably in keeping track of his reading and noticing important points made by the author in support of his/her argument.
Here are a few tips to make your exam essay stand out.
Structural signposts: Divide your essay structurally and logically giving appropriate headings, subheadings and sub-subheadings. These structures acts as signposts to the reader making him/her notice your and his/her development of the essay. The best way to write an exam essay is to make an essay outline infusing the divisions and filling the template in the final draft.
Appropriate and catchy positioning: Avoid writing an essay assignment in long paragraphs where sentences run into five to six lines. The examiner might miss the development of the essay and any significant points in the process. Instead use indentations, pagination, to make your text catchy. Margin your text an inch from all four sides of the page. Keep the main heading on the center of the page, align the sub heading at the margin of the text, and the sub-subheading half an inch from the text margin. When making points, use bullets or numbering.
Adequate line spacing: Make generous use of line spacing. Keep a one line spacing between lines, a double line spacing between sub sections and a triple line spacing between main sections. If you are writing on a plain paper, make sure your lines run straight.
Font size: Keeping a difference in the font size is another way to make your points noticeable. If your text is in 12 point, make your sub-sub headings in the same size, making it bold; the sub heading in the 14 point, in bold; the main heading in 16 point, in bold. You may use colours as well.
Consistency in markings: Whatever layout you may use for your exam essay, make sure you remain consistent in the markings- the spacing, font size, giving equal treatment to equal status items.
The above mentioned tricks help a great deal in scoring well in an essay assignments. It present the structure of the document to the reader making the text easy to read, understand and evaluate.
