Advice: Writing your blog post
As a student, you will contribute to the unit materials
After you have followed the instructions in the Prepare and Reflect Tool in Blackboard to create a Medium account and associate it with your University username we will invite you to be a writer for Digital Society. This lets you submit your assessment posts which will become part of the unit materials. You are also free to submit anything relevant to the topic themes during or after the course.
If you are new to Medium, we suggest you write your first post and these step by step instructions will help you get started.
Write something about yourself and your interest in Digital Society, then click “Publish”. It doesn’t have to be long, Medium was created by one of the founders of X.
When you “Publish” your post you can you can “add topics” and then “Publish and send now”.
Writing the assessments for the Digital Society
This blog post has been written to support you if you have questions around each of the 3 assessments.
Blog style
Each assessment asks you to write in a blog post style which means a more informal tone than the academic essay than you are used to writing.
You should be aiming to think about how to write in an engaging informal style, how you will structure the post and how you will format it.
You could start the process of writing your coursework by reflecting on blog posts you have read previously and think about which ones where engaging in how they were written and formatted.
Although we are asking you to write in a more informal style the marking criteria for the unit is the key to how you should approach each piece of coursework.
- Ensure that you read the assignment brief and the marking criteria and then refer back to it as you are writing to make sure you are ticking off all the different elements.
- Finally, go back to the marking criteria after your work is marked and you have received the feedback. What do you need to change for the next assessment? Is there anything you need to work on? Is there anything that you don’t understand?
Critical analysis
A key theme that runs through the assessment is that we ask you to write critically and you can see this is reflected in the marking criteria page:
an excellent analysis
a well reasoned analysis
a balanced critical account
You might be thinking to yourself about what we mean by an “excellent analysis” or a “balanced critical account”. Being critical can mean lots of different things in different contexts, but in terms of the assessment we are asking you to actively engage with ideas and content, rather than passively accepting the information you encounter as true. This quote from Bell is a useful definition of thinking, reading and writing critically.
“It involves questioning assumptions, querying claims made for which no evidence has been provided, considering the findings of one researcher versus those of others and evaluating”. (Bell,J. Doing your research project 2014)
or a less wordy version…
Also its important to realise that if you are being critical it doesn’t mean being negative, it means being impartial which in terms of the digisoc assessments allows you to judge how effective a piece of evidence is that you include in your work.
By balanced, critical account we are asking you to engage with ideas and content around your chosen topic rather than just accepting them or describing them. By engaging with ideas you can choose to agree or disagree with the sources you are using in your submission. Showing evidence of critical thinking and writing is required to gain the higher marks for each assessment.
Descriptive writing involves representing a situation by setting the background in which an argument can be developed. It involves a presentation of the situation as it stands (without analysis or discussion). (Example: The department met to discuss funding, appraisals and student feedback for the academic year).
Descriptive writing:
- Presents facts and data
- Describes or summarises an event, organisation, case study, experiment
- Provides background information, evidence or context
Whereas critical writing contributes to an academic debate through engaging in analysis. You therefore need to consider the quality of evidence and argument, identify positive and negative aspects you can comment upon, assess relevance and usefulness to the debate and decide which topics/criteria can be used to support your argument. (Example: Following a rigorous debate the department met to discuss the impact that changes to funding and procedure in relation to appraisals and feedback will have on students. Tensions were acknowledged and some aspects of the debate remain ongoing and unresolved).
Critical analysis is examining the positives and the negatives of the evidence you have found to answer the question you have been set. What has the author written about? Have they provided evidence to support their claims? Is it relevant to your coursework? What do you think based on the evidence?
Thinking about information critically is a theme that runs throughout the unit and is a key part of each piece of assessment. For more support around developing your critical skills you can check out the Course timeline for week 3 “Critical analysis in a digital world”.
Please email digisoc@manchester.ac.uk with any questions or problems.
