Postgraduate coursework students

Download a printable version of the Survival Guide [DOCX 212KB]

Defining your purpose

Everybody has their own reasons for embarking on a uni course. Whatever your personal reasons are, you are now joining a group of scholars that share a wider purpose. Their efforts are directed at creating knowledge in their field. This field is a vast international community of people who share interests and practices, and who communicate ideas and information via publications in books, reports, and journal articles. Your reading will take you into that conversation in print, and your writing should be framed as a contribution to it. Even if your lecturer is the only person who will read that writing, you are being trained as a member of the scholarly/professional community. Your course will introduce you to the state of knowledge in your field, and to the questions that its members are currently exploring and arguing over.

You will need to be alert to:

  • what those questions are
  • why people agree or disagree about the answers to them
  • what perspectives or approaches you find helpful, and why
  • what problems or limitations you find in the approaches you encounter.

Many of your assignments will focus on one or more of these points. You will also need to pay attention to the conventions that have developed in your field for writing within this conversation. In each field, there are certain kinds of texts that are commonly written, each with a characteristic structure that is suited to its purpose. You can read these texts more efficiently, and write them more effectively, if you are aware of the way they are usually structured. (‘Usually’, because not every text will conform to the usual patterns; but many will.) Finally, each field has conventional formats for recording what sources (= ‘references’) you have used in your research, and you are expected to use the format specified for ‘referencing’ in each of your subjects.

It can feel tedious to learn a whole new set of conventions, when you already have ways of presenting ideas and information that were used in your previous work or study context. But every context has its own culture, with its own particular values and practices for managing its work. The first thing is to get your head around what people in that culture do, how they do it, and why they do it that way.

How is postgraduate coursework different from professional development?

While each course is different, it may help to be aware of some likely differences between your previous experience and the university course you are embarking on. If you have done an undergraduate degree at uni, you'll find that a postgraduate coursework degree is more vocationally-oriented, with more practical experience and real-world problem-solving.What may be less expected, if you have come from a workplace, are some of the ways that uni courses differ from the professional development offered to employees on occasion. In many PD courses, the time that is set aside for the course is the time you can expect it to take; and the materials you will use are all there ready for you. At uni, however, the time and materials are the tip of the iceberg, and the rest of that iceberg is your responsibility. You may have to spend two, three, or four times as long in independent study as you spend at uni, and you will have to do your own research beyond the resources provided in the course. The aim is to learn about approaches you will continue to develop throughout your career; and to develop a critical perspective to guide your professional judgements about thinking and practice as you go on.

Purposes of assignments

If you think of your own studies as part of that wider project of making knowledge within your field, how does that help you to approach your assignments? You’ll find that many assignments are focused on the relationship between theory and practice, and that your job is to assess:

  • how the theory informs your practice as a member of your field
  • how that practice, in turn, reflects back upon the theory.

What is theory?

Theory is the way that scholars try to make sense of the great variety of experience in their field. They look for patterns from which they can derive generalisations about how and why things happen in the ways that they do. These generalisations are intended to help us understand what we see in practice, and mostly, they do help. However, there may be aspects of practice that are not satisfactorily explained by a theory we’re working with. So, although theory and practice work together, they are also, always, potentially in tension with each other. When the theory seems to be inadequate, then scholars ask what might be needed to improve the theory so that it leads to better understanding, and in turn, to better practice. Some of your readings are likely to explore such problems, and you may be asked to evaluate competing ideas that you find there.

Reflecting critically on theory

What does it mean, then, when you are asked to reflect critically on a theory? It doesn’t mean that you have to find fault with it; rather, you need to ask yourself how the theory helps you to understand what you are looking at, and/or what the theory helps you to do. At the same time, you should ask yourself whether there are limits to its usefulness, and if so, why. You need to know why particular approaches are recommended, and what problems remain unresolved, and why. Thus, you can approach your assignments more effectively if you recognise that many are designed to raise your awareness of that unstable relationship between theory and practice, with each continually reflecting on and revising the other.

Examples of Postgraduate coursework assignments [PDF 59KB]

Using other people's ideas in your own writing

For most assignments, you are expected to make use of the ‘literature’; and in this context, that doesn’t mean fiction, it means scholarly publications on the topic you are exploring. You will usually be assigned readings to do each week, often with lists of ‘further reading’ to do if you have time. You are also expected, often, to find more readings for yourself, developing your research skills and your ability to judge what sources are most relevant and reliable for your purposes.

It’s in all these sources that you find the information, the views, the questions and debates that make up the published conversation around your topic. By considering these sources, and responding to what you find there, you are in a position to join this conversation. In marking your work, your lecturer will consider how far you have engaged with the recommended reading and, if applicable, how well you have succeeded in bringing other appropriate sources into your discussion.

Finding, using and referencing your reading [PDF 128KB] (Finding, using and referencing your reading [DOCX 26.3KB].

Common structures of academic texts

Most uni courses require a lot of reading, and it’s much easier to get what you need out of a text if you know where it’s likely to be. This means you need to know a bit about the typical ways that academic texts of various kinds are organised. Probably the most common types you will encounter in print are journal articles, books, and reports, and perhaps primary sources.

Web-based materials come in a greater variety of forms, often with many layers of information that readers can move around by clicking on links. Sometimes material on the web is identical to the print version, but has been put on the web so that more users can access it; many of the journal articles and public documents you read are of this kind. Other materials, however, have been created for presentation online, and are not usually addressed to an academic audience.

In this guide, we focus on some characteristic structures of academic texts, which are designed for ‘linear’ reading even if a version is also available online as well in print.

Working your way through a text [PDF 134KB] (Working your way through a text [DOCX 79KB]).

Structuring your writing

After the content, probably the most important aspect of your writing is the way you organise it. To be successful, the writing must be perceived as coherent: that is, readers must think the writing holds together and makes sense. We say that it ‘must be perceived’ this way, because there is no single standard of coherence. You achieve coherence by organising your material in a way that your readers expect, and that varies with the type of text (essay? report? something else?) and the educational culture within which you are writing.

  • Are you expected to provide lots of background and current information about your topic, and let your reader draw their own conclusions about how that answers your question? Or should you spell out, early and explicitly, what your reader ought to conclude from the information you are going to present?
  • Are you meant to display vast knowledge about your topic, or present only what is needed to address a limited question?
  • Should you enrich your reader’s experience by using poetic language, or be direct and concise in your style?

There is no universal answer to these questions, but different educational cultures have strong preferences for one option or another. For each of the choices above, Australian academic readers are likely to prefer the second and may even judge the first incompetent. Australian academic readers expect the things they read to be structured so that points are made first, and are then developed further. You have seen how this works in an abstract or in the summary at the start of a report. In an essay, it means that the first, ‘introductory’, paragraph should make the overall point the essay will develop. Then, in each ‘body’ paragraph, the first (‘topic’) sentence should make the point of the paragraph, and then supporting sentences explain that point and illustrate it with evidence. The whole essay is closely focussed on the question and its context, and only material that is relevant to that is welcomed.  And, as the essay unfolds, there are connecting words and phrases that show the reader how ideas relate to each other and to the main, organising idea of the essay.

Developing the structure of your writing [PDF 132KB]

(Writing style [PDF 243KB] (Writing style [DOCX 57KB])

Resources for particular purposes

Where to get more help