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Getting started with assignments

Planning and organising an assignment for the first time may seem daunting to new students. This short video walks you through easy steps for analysing assessment tasks, reading, taking notes, and planning assignments.

Planning an assignment.

When you get an assignment, it is not effective just to sit down and write. You need to plan, and here are three important steps for planning an assignment.

You need to analyse the task, so that you know exactly what you are being asked to do. You need to read and take notes in an organised way. And, you need to plan the structure of your writing.

First, read the task really carefully to work out what the topic is and how they want you to write the assignment. Here is an example. First, find the topic through the content words. Then, look for instructional words that tell you how to write the assignment.

Now, think carefully about what this means. Having two instructional words in the question probably means two parts to the essay. It’s helpful to rewrite the question in your own words to really understand it. Getting it right at this point can save a lot of pain later on. Then, you need to find all the information you need. You need to read a lot and take notes. This takes lots of time. This is why you cannot leave things to the last minute.

Read the general stuff first, and then the more specific. Reading generally is really important if you are not familiar with the topic. Start with books. Academic journal articles tend to be quite specific – these need some general understanding before you read them. Writing notes is important, too, because it helps you remember. But you need to keep your notes organised so you can easily find information and the sources they come from.

Here is a system. The left-hand margin is for scanning the page, and if you organise it like this, you can keep a record of your references. Once you have all the information you need, plan by using a mind map. Mind maps have three steps: (1) brainstorm everything you know about the topic, (2) group, prioritise, and maybe even delete some of the ideas, (3) organise all of this and show the connections between the ideas.

But the last step in planning is turning this mind map into a linear plan. Work out the structure of the body first before any other section. This can take a lot of thought. Work from big structures like sections, to finer structures like paragraphs, finding the most logical order for everything can be quite tricky, too. After all of this is done, then write your assignment.

Slam your assignment: plan it, research it, write it

This short tutorial gives you an overview of the process of planning, researching and writing an assignment with quick links to the resources you can use at each stage.

Not all assignments are the same, so the first step is to discover what type of assignment you are doing, and what you are being asked to do.
Start by understanding your assignment. Assignment details can usually be found in the assignments section of your course's Canvas shell. If you have any issues locating this, contact your tutor, lecturer, or teacher.

Read the assignment instructions and rubric to know what is required and what markers are looking for. Find tips for doing this on the Learning Lab's Researching your assignment page.

What if you have to do something you haven’t done before? In the Assessment section of the Learning Lab there are guides to different assignment types such as literature reviews, reports and presentations.

Next, think about what you already know about the subject and what you have learnt in your lectures. This is a good time to go back over your lecture notes and review lecture recordings, if you have access to them.

Now, you can move on to doing some brainstorming to generate ideas for your assignment. Visit the Mindmapping page for some great ideas about how to do this.

Now that you understand the assignment and have come up with some ideas, it’s time to move on to the next stage: research it.

Assessment tasks at university require you to do some research beyond your course notes.

The next stage is about finding credible and reliable information. To understand what is meant by this, visit the Why can’t I just google it? and What is scholarly information? pages.

The RMIT Library home page is a great place to start your search for information- you can use LibrarySearch and access an extensive list of databases and journals. Remember to log in for full access to resources.

If you would like to search for information in your subject area, you can use the Library’s subject guides which provide lists of databases and links to useful resources for specific subject areas.

If you run into any issues or would like to speak to someone about finding or evaluating information, you can connect with a Librarian via the AskTheLibrary chat widget on the Library's home page.

When it comes to writing your assignment, remember that you can learn about how to structure your work in the assessments section of the Learning Lab.

For tips on how to organise your information, check out the Writing paragraphs and Writing sentences pages. For general information on the features of formal writing, visit the Academic style page.

When it comes to including the research you have done into your work, you can find advice in the Referencing section of the Learning Lab about how to integrate ideas, paraphrase, quote and more.

Images on this page by RMIT, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

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