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EPQ Guide: Expressing your ideas

 

Expressing your ideas

This is the stage you have been building towards - writing your report. Although that is largely the focus of this page , it is not all there is to the EPQ.

Your EPQ will be assessed on:

  1. Your completed Production Log
  2. A written report (sometimes referred to in this guide as an essay)
    • if your project is a research based written report of any kind (e.g. a science investigation or an essay) it should be approximately 5,000 words long
    • If your project is an artefact, it must be accomapanied by a research based written report of a minimum of 1,000 words. For artefacts, you may include photos showing various stages of the production process as well as the final product. You do not need to submit a large artefact as evidence - photographs or other media are fine.
  3. A presentation on the project process
    • If your product was itself a presentation then you still need to produce a presentation about the process of producing it!
    • Your presentation must be delivered live to a non-specialist audience and might use flipcharts or posters, presentation tools such as PowerPoint or Prezi or short video clips. The evidence for your presentation will  include a record in your Production Log of questions your supervisor asked and how you responded.

On this page you will find guidance on:

And

As well as resource boxes in the sidebar on:

Am I ready?

Am I ready to start writing my essay?

Before you start writing, think:

  • Is my investigation largely complete? As you write you may find that you need a few additional resources or information to support your argument, but you should not start to write until you are largely sure where your argument is going.
  • Have I filled in a Research Organiser (which you will find on the Working with Ideas tab)? This will help you to organise your thoughts and make sure you understand the argument you intend to make and have the evidence to support it. While not compulsory, it makes writing your final essay significantly easier.
  • Do I understand how to write in an appropriate academic style? Guidance is given in the Academic Writing box below.
  • Do I know how to import my sources from my Investigative Journal? Don't waste time putting all your citation data in again! Import all your sources as you set up your document. There are helpsheets in the Resources for PC / Mac users boxes to the right.

You should use the Oakham APAv3 Academic Writing Template (below) rather than a generic Word template to set up your essay.

(The image below is taken from the EE LibGuide, but the template is just as useful for EPQs)

Citing and referencing

There are many different ways to acknowledge the sources you use. These are called referencing styles. You are free to use any recognised referencing style you wish for your EPQ, but Oakham's 'house style' is APA. We suggest you use this because we already have a lot of support in place for it. APA is an 'Author-date' system, meaning that you show which source you have used by putting the author and date in brackets after it in your text, and then put the full reference in an alphabetical list at the end of the essay. The Library does not support 'footnote referencing', where you put all the information in a footnote at the bottom of the page. If you want help with this then please talk to the member of staff who suggested that you use it.

For detailed information and guidance on how to use sources in your writing and how to cite and reference them accurately using the tools in Microsoft Word, consult the Citing and Referencing LibGuide. This site includes information about how to reference all sorts of different kinds of sources, including videos and works of art, and what to do if you are using a source written in a language that is not the language of your essay. It also gives some examples of how to use in-text citations, whether quoting, paraphrasing or just referring to a source more generally, and how to use the automatic citing and referencing tools in Word.

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Academic writing

Stages in an academic essay

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Your thesis is the point you want to make. It emerges from your research and your task is to use the evidence you have found to establish it as the most reasonable response to that research.

Approaches to an academic essay
Persuasive (Argumentative) Analytical
A persuasive (or argumentative) approach proceeds from the answer to the research question through a detailed analysis of the arguments surrounding the research question — their claims, their evidence, and their assumptions.
An analytical approach arrives at the answer to the research question after a detailed analysis of the arguments surrounding the research question — their claims, their evidence, and their assumptions.
e.g.  Should smoking be illegal?
After stating the research question, this starts with a defendable position - the thesis -  which is then supported by arguments that persuade the reader of your point of view.  Using evidence you are defending your thesis in the essay.
e.g.  What conditions produce the highest yield of salicylic acid during hydrolysis?
This starts with a research question, which is then answered by your thesis in the conclusion of the essay.  Your essay presents the evidence that shows how you have arrived at your conclusion. 

In both approaches, you must state the research question in your introduction, and make sure you return to it in your conclusion.

Sections required in your essay

Have a look at the Formal Presentation guide in the sidebar for a guide to laying out your essay.

Paragraph Structure

Paragraphs themselves have a structure - the most common you will have come across is likely to be PEEL. The letters often stand for slightly different things in different subjects, but the idea is largely the same - introduce your main idea for the paragraph (Point), justify it with Evidence and/or Examples, and Evaluate this evidence. Finally, Link back to the Research Question and/or Link forward to the next paragraph.

This is not the only way to write a paragraph and, with experience, you will soon find that your argument develops a flow of its own that does not require a formula - indeed, your essay would be very dull if every paragraph followed exactly the same structure. However, this structure can be a useful scaffold to get you started and make sure you don't miss anything important.

Paragraph structure

 

The structure of academic writing

Note that the following graphic was originally produced for the IB Extended Essay, but is equally applicable to the EPQ.

Planning your essay

It is vital to plan your essay before you start writing. An essay plan provides an outline of your argument and how it develops.

What sections and subsections do you need?

Although this might change as you write your essay, you should not start writing until you have your overall structure. Then think about roughly how you are going to divide your 5000 words between the different sections. 5000 words seems like a lot before you start writing, but it is much easier to write to the limit, section by section, than to try to cut your essay down once it is written.

What will the reader will expect to see and where?

Look back at your checklist and think about where in your essay you are planning to include the required information. Make sure the flow of your essay makes sense to a reader who may be a subject expert but knows little about your topic. Have you included background information? Details of experimental methods? Arguments and counter arguments?

 

Now get writing!

You've read all the guidance. You've made your plan. Now you have a blank screen in front of you and you just need to get started! Start with the section you think you will find easiest to write and work outwards from there, or follow the steps below to get started. Don't forget to write with the word limit in mind though.

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undefinedReWriting: It's just not working!!

What if you are writing lots of paragraphs but your essay just doesn't seem to be coming together?

1. Condense each paragraph into a short statement or bullet point. This is the skeleton structure of your essay.

2. Look at the order of the statements.

  • Is the order logical?
  • Does each point follow another in a sensible order?
  • Do you need to change the order?
  • Do you need to add paragraphs?
  • Do you need to remove paragraphs?

3. Add, subtract and rearrange the paragraphs until your structure makes sense.

4. Redraft using your new paragraph order.  

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

"Work on it. Work on it. When you think it’s good, it’s probably not. Just keep working. It’ll get better. All writing is re-writing. You never get it right; it’ll just get better. When you’ve gone through it many times and replaced the one word with another word, and then replaced that word with the same word again, you’re getting there."

Willard, D. (2003) My journey to and beyond tenure in a secular university. Retrieved from: www.dwillard.org/articles/individual/my-journey-to-and-beyond-tenure-in-a-secular-university. Accessed: 9th May 2020

Oh no! It's too long!!

If you haven't managed to write to the word limit and are suddenly faced with cutting down an essay that is over the word limit, try these tips on concise writing from Purdue Online Writing Lab.

Use the menu on the left of this page from Purdue OWL to browse the four very practical pages on writing concisely and one on the Paramedic Method for reducing your word count.

AQA Guide to completing the Production Log: Expressing your ideas

AQA copyright notice

The presentation above contains slides from the AQA presentation Teaching slides: how to complete the production log (available from the AQA EPQ Teaching and Learning Resources website).  These slides are Copyright © 2020 AQA and its licensors. All rights reserved.

A downloadable copy of the Production Log can be found here, on the Home tab of this guide.


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