How to write a first class essay & dissertation WITH EXAMPLES

I literally only did one thing to get a first class degree at University and I'm not sat here to tell you a bunch of generic random and useless advice like 10 top study tips to help you get a first class degree make sure you're working out and have a work-life balance and eat healthy and make sure you have time for social time and here are 10 random study tips that are going to help you make better notes no I don't believe in any of that I think that's a waste of your time so I'm gonna

cut to the Chase and tell you how to actually work smarter and not harder and how I got a first class degree by literally just doing the bare minimum and also living my uni life to the fullest I was always at the club I was always a different social events I spent many more time studying and this is how I did it in this video I'm going to be explaining the only skill the one skill that you need that will actually increase your mark and the examiners will actually be looking for ready study the mark

scheme that is the skill and now we're going to be delving into what that actually means what that looks like and how you're going to take that and turn it into a first class degree Mark before I even thought about how I was going to answer the essay question or what my document was going to involve I would always open two documents I would split screen them so they were always side by side the first document over here would just be the plan and the essay structure the thing that I would look at the most

drawing writing the essay and then this document over here is the actual essay itself which you're going to be submitting once you've opened up your planning document here you're going to open up an internet Tab here and get up your University Mark scheme for this specific essay I would always do a rough read through of the bottom few marks to see what exactly not to do but most importantly you want to be looking at that top band everything it says in there and how you are going to achieve that planning is essential it means you're

not going to Waffle it means everything you write will be correct and will be useful in actually increasing your mark right so you're going to be writing a paragraph structure which you're going to be repeating throughout the body of your essay and within this paragraph structure first you're going to be studying the mark scheme and incorporating all of those points into your power our structure so you don't even need to look at the Mark scheme after this throughout the entire period of you writing this 3000 word essay let's say all you have to do is

look at this little paragraph that you've written and make sure whatever answer you're writing up follows that structure and automatically you're hitting all of the mark scheme you're writing an organized and coherent and clear precise piece of work which is also always in the top band of every University Mark scheme and mostly you are saving your own time okay so now let's get into the paragraph structure so a typical peel paragraph structure you probably were taught in school but we're going to change it up a little bit and make it our own so it matches

a first class degree criteria so typically you would have Point evidence explain link back to question but our first class degree paragraph structure is going to be Point evidence explain critical analysis another explanation and then link back to the question now let's go into how you're going to achieve each of these sections now you're going to have several paragraphs throughout the body of your essay that follows this structure and every single one will start with point in order to achieve a cohesive and clear essay you have to make sure you're starting with Point slash a

topic sentence so whatever you're going to argue in that next paragraph the first sentence needs to highlight that step number two is evidence now we're going to go into a little bit more detail here and how you play this really determines what Mark you're going to get so for evidence if you're only using one to two quotes from one piece of academic work and you're referencing the author and all of your citations are correct and all of that that is still not enough for a first class degree Mark you need to be synthesizing sources and

also be collating information from wide-ranging academic sources your best friends in terms of collating academic research to reference in your evidence throughout your essay are going to be academic databases such as mintel Google Scholar will be your best friend to get academic journals do not use websites the University website should actually have a web page on all of their academic databases that they recommend so whatever my point is I'm now going to support that with evidence from a few sources so for example I might say the author X argues and then a quote or I

might say for my evidence however in recent research it has been argued that blah blah blah and then synthesized two authors from two different academic journals together right so if they have similar ideas you can then put them in a synthesized reference which is automatically going to bump up your mark once you synthesize a few authors and a few similar pieces of evidence from different academic databases that support the first point you've made you're now going to go into explaining this in detail the more depth and Rich detail you can provide the higher Your Mark

will be in this first explain part of the paragraph it's crucial that you also bring in relevant theories from your course this is where your lecture notes are going to come into play your critical analysis is where you're now going to bring in another piece of evidence which contradicts that first piece of evidence that you included in this specific paragraph you're going to bring in research and evidence from other authors in other sources to argue against the evidence that you already included in your specific paragraph and what this is going to do is allow you

to talk about the limitations and gaps in the current knowledge out there your examiner is gonna love it if each of your power paragraphs includes you acknowledging the limitation and gaps in existing knowledge so now that you're on the critical analysis section you've brought in another piece of evidence to contrast against the first piece of evidence you put in you can now compare and contrast authors and kind of say where the limitations are how they either support each other or contradict each other and use this to develop your argument the best hack to be able

to achieve critical analysis straight away is by looking on academic phrase Banks online now I went to University of Leicester and they didn't have this but University of Manchester has a free one that you can download on their website and I use this for everything and all of my final essays and exams even in my dissertation and what it does is you're using phrases at the beginning of your sentence which signals to The Examiner this is where I'm using critical analysis this is where I'm now evaluating all you have to do is Google academic phrase

Banks so like you need Manchester for example or you should Google critical analysis phrases or critical analysis sentence starters there are so many websites online I probably used all of them okay that will give you all the ascendant starters and then whatever Point you're making just make sure your sentence structure kind of follows that just so it's extra clear to The Examiner that you are hitting all the requirements of the top band of the marks team and one last little bit on critical analysis it is really important that you include this you're not falling into

the Trap of submitting a descriptive piece of work which is very easy to fall into I did this a couple of times during my first year and then I was awarded a 2-2 Mark and then by my third year I was only ever getting firsts a descriptive essay might still sound really good in academic to you but all it's really including is who said this when did they say it who was affected whereas a critical piece of writing which is what examiners are actually looking for for higher marks we'll discuss why is it significant how

did it occur why did this happen why is the author making that argument why is that argument relevant it's really about questioning and criticizing the pieces of research you're using in your essay to make the best argument so in the very top band of University essay mark schemes they will always mention that they want you to have an advanced nuanced and thorough understanding of your essays subject matter and although that might sound hard now that we're on to the final explanation part of all the work you've already done in your paragraph it's very easy now

you're going to tie in all of this information that you've just collated for the argument that you've made in this one paragraph but you've made your point you've gotten evidence from multiple sources and put them together or contrasted them against each other you've then explained it then you put critical analysis where now you're questioning your significance and the relevance you've already included so many various viewpoints so now in this final explanation you're going to show that you're aware of everything that's already out there tying it all together and tying it in with your main point

and then finally linking it back to the question and making sure it applies to your essay so as long as you do all of those things to a good standard and your subject knowledge is correct you will get a first class and I know that because I use this exact same structure I did each of these steps and I would always get a first class I also got a first class Mark in my dissertation so I wanted to teach you guys how to do the same um but before I go into that I want to

talk about one thing specifically in collating information from academic sources that's a good little hack at making sure you achieve High marks now I didn't do this in my general 3000 word essays for each of my uni modules but I did this a lot in my dissertation because it's a bigger body of work this was necessary so this does link to dissertation but if I could go back in time I would have done this for my 3000 word essays as well for my dissertation I had an Excel spreadsheet open and once I knew what my

gestation question was going to be kind of what I wanted to write about in it I immediately started researching because that's the first step of writing any dissertation you need to look at all of the existing information out there how that's going to support your argument and how that's going to form your whole 10 000 word essay so in this Excel spreadsheet I would have the author the date was written the title of the academic paper the arguments they made in it so whenever I was writing my essay I literally had a spreadsheet full of

academic sources I could keep putting in rather than constantly having to Google but what's really important in this pre-reading technique and in that spreadsheet of all of the academic make articles you've pre-read once you're pre-reading them and you're skimming them and you're kind of noting down okay this is who wrote it this is when it was written this is their main argument throughout that skimming process make sure you're writing what is the author's intention here what is their intention to persuade the audience and this is why you can kind of identify any biases which you're

then going to include in the gaps in the knowledge or the limitations section of your paragraph structure which we mentioned before you also want to know how effective was that argument and make a few little bullet points of that in your spreadsheet and then lastly you want to identify any limitations such as it was written a really really long time ago or it was a peer-reviewed article so it's not that accurate or it was written on a website that might have some bias so now you have the spreadsheet of academic Journal one two three four

and then academic Journal one you got the author the date the main argument which you'll find in the abstract the limitations of it the intended message any bias and then when you're writing your essay and you need evidence and you need to back up with previous research you literally already have it there and it cuts your workload and time in half okay now let's talk about how you're going to get a first class Mark in your dissertation this was stressful right but it wasn't nearly as stressful as I thought it was going to be I

didn't cry once and I've heard so many stories of people crying during the whole dissertation process I also left my very last minute I did the whole 10 000 essay work within just over two months I think whereas most people started in September October and kept it consistent throughout of course I do recommend that but I'm just saying I left until the very last minute and when I was talking to my supervisor she said by far I was the most organized on top of my work and she always said that I was on track for

a first class um so I always knew whatever I was doing even though it was last minute and it wasn't the smartest way to do it it was correct first and foremost please please take advantage of your dissertation supervisor they are there for a reason okay I'm the kind of person I like to do everything by myself I don't like to ask anybody for it but help I've never been one to ask my teachers questions or talk to the lecturer after the lecture like no but a dissertation is hard work book and that supervisor is

a pro at it take advantage of their knowledge and just remember you are paying for University one way or another okay of course you have a mark scheme outlined for your dissertation as well how to hit that High Mark but your supervisor is going to know that Mark scheme inside and out your supervisor is also an examiner for other people's dissertations so they are like the ultimate Mark scheme that's why you need to soak up all of the knowledge that they have another thing that links to the marks game and this is why I say

this is literally the only skill you need to get a first class degree in uni because so many things link back to the mark scheme when you're Googling the mark scheme for your dissertation for your particular uni your uni website will also have previous dissertations that have been marked by examiners or like examiner reports or dissertations and they'll always include one that got a first class one that got a two one one that got a two two and one that was a fail I downloaded each of those and I re-read and examined them myself over

and over and over again and I was looking at all the examiner comments on each of these different dissertations with different Mark bands and I was especially studying the difference between between the examiner's marks on the 2-1 essay and the First Class essay I was looking at all the mistakes the person in the 2-1 dissertation made and all of the things that the first class person did right and then incorporating that into my strategy of writing my dissertation I looked at those examiner reports daily like all the time I studied them inside and out and

I could not recommend that enough because that is another form of Mark scheme for you to study and incorporate into your dissertation and Essay plan another form of Mark scheme you can use I went into my University library and I was I was not there a lot okay but I went and this was the first time in three years I actually went to where all the books are and checked out a book for the first time in three years and I actually recommend it these thoughts of writing a dissertation sounded so scary and it's a

very daunting task okay you're not really taught how to do it they just say now you have to write a decision go and do it so I went to my uni library and I found as many books like textbooks on how to write a literature review how to write the discussion part of a dissertation how to conduct primary research how to get a first class how to get a first-class marketing dissertation there are so many textbooks that you'll find in your uni library that are titled just those things I took all of them and I

read them it's like a form of a more detailed Mark scheme and that is essentially it that is the one main skill that I used to get a first class in all of my essays my dissertation and finally get a first class degree certificate which is the biggest achievement of this entire year I really hope you guys enjoyed this video and you took something away from it if you did make sure you comment down below and thumbs up this video also feel free to DM me on Instagram let me know if this video helped you

because I would love to know and my DMs are always open you can follow me on Instagram at tamco and I will see you guys in the next video because I make videos weekly bye