While many postgraduate students are confident writers, some writing tasks still provide their own specific challenges. There are certain pieces of work which take any postgraduate writer out of the “comfort zone” of the familiar essay or chapter writing routine, and may leave the writer wondering: “just what am I required to do here?”
Writing a proposal is a task that crops up infrequently, but of course is a hurdle that must be surmounted before any research project can progress. Furthermore, it will be subject to review by a school or faculty committee so it needs to hit all the right notes. A research proposal may also be set as a coursework assignment in many programmes, often as part of a research methods paper – useful practice for submitting the real thing for your thesis or dissertation project. The Student Learning Centre – Puna Aronui (SLC) has a new handout online that will assist you in all these situations. “Writing a research proposal” covers topics such as the structure of a proposal, project working title, introduction, initial literature review, methodology and methods, timeline, resources, and plenty more.
Putting together a journal article is another writing project that can be set as a coursework assignment, may be part of the thesis project itself (in the “Pathway Two” approach), or may be a follow up to the completion of a thesis or dissertation. Whatever the context, a journal article has particular features that you must be aware of, and particular challenges that you must take into account. “Writing an article for publication” is the second of the new handouts produced by the SLC. Topics addressed in this handout include article purpose, selecting a journal, keyword selection, the use of figures and tables, avoiding common mistakes and dealing with peer reviewers’ feedback.
