Navies of Different Nations since the End of Cold War History Essay

Writing the Essay
The following points are designed to help you complete your written assignment.
■ Remember, that these answers are not designed to be definitive accounts. Marks will be awarded on the following criteria. They are an 'opportunity' for the student to prove, furnishing evidence where necessary, that he or she:
o Has carried out sufficient research utilizing material from a suitably broad range of appropriate and reliable sources
o Can reference material in accordance with published requirements.
o Has understood the question and has answered it in a relevant, direct & concise fashion and organised material and argument in a sensible, well-structured manner.
Have supported their argument with well-chosen material analysed in reasonable depth.

o Has answered the question in a well-written fashion with properly constructed, grammatically correct sentences and appropriately used paragraphs.
■ Planning your answer is essential. When you have finished your research and before you begin your answer write out an essay plan of how you re going to approach your answer.
■ Answer the question that you have been asked. Do NOT re-write the question to suit you. If a question has more than one element, then you must answer them ALL, keeping an appropriate balance between them.
■ Do not limit the scope of your essay at the outset, by choosing to address only parts of the subject.
■ Keep your material relevant to the question. As you are writing your essay keep referring to the question to ensure that you are not straying off track. Be ruthless, for if you are not the marker will be! If you cannot really justify the retention of a sentence or paragraph then remove it. (If you believe that the information might still be of interest you can place it in a footnote - which do not count towards the word limit!)
■ You will most probably be asked to provide a work of analysis - NOT narrative. Do not fall into the trap of just telling a story. Explain (usually in advance) why the material is relevant to your answer.
■ Do not use the first person ("I" or "my") in an academic essay.
• When using numbers m text the usual convention is to write the numbers one to ten in text form with numbers greater than ten expressed as digits, e.g. one, two...ten, ii, 12,13...10,001 etc.
■ Assessment will always include the quality of English, so you must pay attention to sentence construction, grammar, punctuation and spelling.
■ Avoid complex and overlong sentences which can often obscure your intended meaning Keep your sentences simple and to the point.
Avoid a chatty' or conversational style - these are formal essays. You are not talking to a friend in the pub or on the 'phone!
■ Don t use words you don't really understand, perhaps because you think they sound impressive. If you're in any doubt check their meaning in a dictionary.
■ Punctuation is important. It has been described as *a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling'. But it is more than that. A misplaced comma, for example, can completely alter a sentence's intended

meaning. Therefore, use punctuation wisely; be alert to potential ambiguities' You should always remain in control of your prose. Don't be afraid to use a guide to English usage or to seek advice.
■ Always read through your work very carefully to ensure that it ‘flows' and that it is not clunky and difficult to read and that there are no careless grammatical or other errors. If it doesn't immediately make sense to you, it's hardly likely to make sense to anyone else1 Be wary of seeing what you think you'd written rather than what is actually on the page.
■ The use of a reliable English dictionary, a thesaurus, and a guide to English usage are all encouraged and you are reminded of the assistance of the Word spelling and grammar checkers, but remember that neither is infallible. Make sure that the suggested grammatical replacement makes sense - it frequently doesn't1 Ensure that the spell-checker's dictionary is set to ‘UK English'. (Click on Tools and then Language on the top menu and ensure that ‘UK English' is *ticked'.)
Remember: You will lose marks if the standard of English is poor.
The Essay
■ The essay should be divided into three elements- the introduction, the main body, and a conclusion.
Introduction
■ There are at least two schools of thought about the introduction. You can use it to establish what you think the question is asking and to provide a brief element of context or you can use it to outline how you are going to answer the question.
■ If you choose the latter approach be careful not to unnecessarily limit the range of your answer and certainly avoid being explicit about this! In doing so, you make it clear that you are either unaware of other factors or are deliberately choosing to ignore them. Either way, you have alerted the reader to some significant potential shortcomings. If, for example, you state that in answer to the question you intend to discuss three factors - when there may be many more - then you immediately limit the scope of your answer. If these three fail to include some key factors you have also inevitably limited the number of marks you can be awarded as well!

Conclusion■ To a large degree the format of the conclusion depends on your approach in the introduction. Therefore, if you have set out how you are going to answer the question and have done so in the mam body of the essay the conclusion may be quite brief. But if you have used the introduction to set the question in context and to establish its meaning then your conclusion will need to be more comprehensive, pulling together the various elements from the mam body in order to answer the question.

FootnotesTo many, footnotes can appear off-putting and seemingly irrelevant or unnecessary. In fact, once explained their use should become straightforward. Word and other word-processing programmes have simple operations to ensure that this is done with minimum effort. The use of Word's facility is explained below.
Footnotes certainly fulfil a number of important roles:
• The purpose of footnotes is to enable any reader of your work to identify quickly and accurately the source material. They consequently play a crucial role in demonstrating the thoroughness of your research and the strength of the evidence you have provided to underpin your argument Your analysis is clearly going to carry more weight if you support it with evidence from authoritative sources rather than from the questionable, lightweight or if there are no supporting references at all. This is particularly so if you are adopting a controversial approach. And remember that this approach works very well in a service paper or commercial report.
• Footnotes also permit the reader to follow up the writer's research You should adopt this approach when using other people's work. It will open up new sources of material, besides which you may interpret the material in a different way.
• Complete and accurate referencing also plays a vital part in demonstrating that the work is yours alone and has not been plagiarised, either deliberately or by accident.
• Footnotes should always be used to indicate the source of the facts (if not common knowledge) on which you have based your argument, of a paraphrased element from another writer, and of direct quotations. They may also be used to include additional information that would otherwise disturb the flow of the text.
• Except when using newspaper or short magazine articles or when quoting from html documents page numbers MUST be provided, i.e. for books, journal articles, chapters, long magazine articles and PDF documents. References without page numbers are of no use!
YOU WILL LOSE MARKS IF YOU FAIL TO ADEQUATELY FOOTNOTE YOUR
WORK
The format required is also that favoured by the StafLVyr^j.nS.d.^dbook and by ^ k^Tstaff & Command College.