OU blog

Personal Blogs

Melanie Rimmer

How to write clearly in essays

Visible to anyone in the world

A young bearded black man reading a book outdoors near a lake

The convention when writing student essays is to forget you are writing for your tutor or lecturer. After all, they already know all this stuff - they are probably the one who taught it to you. Instead you imagine you are writing for someone else.

Your imaginary reader is intelligent and educated, so you don’t need to dumb down your writing. But they are not expert in this field, so you do need to explain any concepts or jargon terms to them. You need to describe any experiments. They haven’t watched the module videos or read the textbook or the articles you have been given, so you need to summarise those in your own words.

You could imagine that your reader is a fellow undergraduate who is studying a different subject. Or you could imagine that you are writing for a past version of yourself, shortly before you began studying this module. So anything you didn’t know before you started the module will need to be explained.

When editing your essays, put yourself in the shoes of this imaginary reader and ask yourself "Would I understand this essay if I hadn't studied this module already? Or am I assuming the reader already knows the things I know"? You may need to rewrite some parts to make it clearer.

The best way to check whether your writing is clear enough is to get someone else to read your essay, and ask if it made sense to them. If they couldn't follow what you wrote, you may need to do some rewriting.

Permalink
Share post