Higher education students in the UK are predominantly assessed through the medium of writing, with essays being the most common type of assignment. As an academic writing tutor, I have been ‘part of the system’ for several years now, preparing foundation students to understand and appropriately address essay tasks in their university studies.
The mere existence of my job has depended on the long-lived and cherished tradition of essay writing as a means to facilitate learning, diagnose students’ progress and assess understanding. I have always admired the format of academic essay that has an inherent potential to give learners space for expressing new and original ideas and, at the same time, demonstrating their deep understanding of the existing knowledge.
Students have not always shared my enthusiasm though. Moreover, the combination of independent thought and experts’ ideas that I admired was often a matter of confusion for learners. This issue, I learned later, had already been noticed by Womack in 1993. It seems worth quoting his words here, as after almost 30 years they can still resonate with educators.
