Effective Essay Writing at Postgraduate Level

Effective Essay Writing at Postgraduate Level

Study skills are the most important part for the successful completion and effective learning at any level or in the pursuance of any degree. As the levels advance, the complexity and the nature of education intensifies which continuously prompts students to plan. It is through this careful planning and analyzing the work; reflecting upon the work done, that effectively shapes the study skills further for effective learning at advanced levels as post-graduate level. In this assignment, we will discuss the entire procedure; from development of the research strategy to the critical reflection of work produced, that can help in the shaping of study skills for the post-graduate level through planning and reflecting at post-graduate level.

Task 1 - Research Strategy

Research strategy is of fundamental value in the successful execution of any assignment or the project. It is excessively emphasized and is treated as the top priority because of its criticality as it deals with the accumulation of all the relevant material that is needed for the completion of the assignment. Thus, if the strategy is not right or the search terms and keywords used are not clear and precise so as to trigger results that are relevant, the researcher would end up collecting irrelevant information thereby eventually resulting in the production of an irrelevant assignment.

Keeping in light this impact of the research strategy, for this specific assignment which is the 'Planning & Reflecting at Post-graduate level', I will develop my research strategy. First and foremost, it is imperative to identify the keywords that are most likely to highlight the theme of the topic for which the assignment or the research project is about. Thus, the keyword is pre-dominantly selected from the topic statement. Two or three keyword are selected which are considered most effective as they limit the domain to the most relevant material and thus prompt quick access to better results, thereby increasing efficiency.

The keywords that I identified to form the basis of the research strategy are 'effective', 'post-graduate' and 'research'. These keywords and key phrases would be used to gain access to the relevant material. The keywords are then further probed to define their synonym so that if main keyword failed to provide desired results, the synonyms are used for the purpose. For the same purpose, related terms and alternative forms of the keywords are also used. Thus for a keyword, there may exist numerous synonym keywords. The synonym keywords that I selected for this assignment for all the keywords are efficient, competent, well-organized, advanced, project and assignment.

On the basis of these, search strategy is devised. I formulated the search strategy with the incorporation of Boolean operators as 'And' and 'Or'. Synonyms were collated together with the use of 'Or' in between whereas different keywords were collated together using the Boolean operator 'And'. Once the phrases or expressions are formed, the decision regarding the search engine and the search tools were ...