Your essay must critically engage with academic debates on this topic.
Your essay should also demonstrate that you have understood the principles of climate science and the impact of our actions on the built environment have on climate change
Your essay should be 3000 words (+/- 10%). The word count includes quotations, but does not include references or image captions. Please include images to help support your arguments.
Remember to use the specified file formats for your submissions (usually .doc and .pdf), and to ensure that you make PDFs with word processing software rather than image based packages such as Photoshop. The university’s systems may pick up the use of image-based PDFs for essays and prevent your work from being uploaded.
Referencing
We reference according to the author-date style ‘Cite Them Right Harvard’. Details can be found in the MMU Library here: https://www.mmu.ac.uk/library/referencing-and- study-support/referencing/cite-them-right-harvard
We will discuss this more in the Humanities lectures, but it is essential that you let us know the sources for any information you use, the books that have informed your thinking, the places where quotations and images are sourced from. It is not enough to give the URL of a website for example, or to rely on the basics gleaned from Wikipedia. We’ll discuss the assessment quality of resources for university level academic essays, so that you can make the best use of the wide range of material available. Remember that you have access to two well stocked university libraries at MSA, not just one. On one level, good referencing is politeness: best academic practice, giving credit where it is due for the work that has informed you. More importantly, the best academic work is part of an intellectual context, not the work of a lone, individual genius. Literature and other sources are important resources, they represent raw material that you can discuss, apply to new contexts, and argue for or against; it is essential therefore that you say what these sources are. This is an important step up in the kind of written work expected of you at a university level, and your use of sources is part of the assessment in Humanities.
Presentation
We expect your work in Humanities to be presented as carefully as it is in studio. This does not mean elaborate layouts, but clear typography and good use of writing conventions. Your essays will often be heavily illustrated – more so than your friends in other courses or disciplines might have to write. We assess illustrations in the round as part of the essay: they are as much a part of the content of your essay as the writing, as much a part of the argument you are making, and also as part of the presentation. Select images carefully, make your own drawings clear, type any captions for the drawings and make reference to the images within the text. Please submit essays in portrait format (like this document) and follow the instructions given for other assignments. We’ll help you by showing examples and using these conventions in the essays and papers we share with you.
Word counts
The word count indicates how long we would like each assignment to be, and is an important part of ensuring your assignment is presented. Editing is an important skill to learn and sometimes we ramble on in essays when they ought to be somewhat tighter. We also like to keep an eye on how much work we are giving you across the entire programme, and do everything we can to ensure we do not overload you with work to do. Please keep within +/- 10% of the given word count.