Essays

Essays are the most common types of undergraduate written assignments, especially in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. In academic contexts, essays usually involve a point of view or some indication of your position or thesis on the issue. Depending on the assignment question and type of essay, the thesis may be explicitly stated at the beginning of the essay or implied and stated more clearly at the end of the essay.This unit presents five types of essays you may write at university: analysis, visual analysis, discussion, reflection and argumentation. These labels may not be used in the assignment question itself, but you are often instructed to ‘analyse’, ‘describe’ or ‘discuss’ an issue (see a list of instruction words and their meaning in Appendix B)