International Management Question: Take a particular product or service and conduct a Global Market Opportunity Assessment in order to identify the most promising country to target.
Writing an Essay
Leadership
When writing an essay it is useful to think about who you’re writing the essay for:
• Yourself
• Your course tutor(s)
• An imaginary reader (e.g. fellow student on a different course)
As the writer you need to think about what you need to have in your essay that will be relevant and useful to your own learning (obviously within the context of the essay question).
Your course tutor wants to find out what you know and whether you can evaluate what you know. She or he also wants to see whether you can represent this in a coherent way demonstrating that you have read and understood the relevant reference materials. The task is not only what you know but what you can do with what you know.
Your imaginary reader needs explanation and a path through what you know. You need to write an essay that would be readable and interesting and without any loose ends.
Dealing with an Essay
Consider each of the following aspects of writing in relation to your own written work. Spend a few minutes thinking about the different questions and what you actually do when you write an essay.
Planning -How do you go about planning an essay?
Reading -How does your essay influence your reading?
Organisation -How do you decide how to organise your essay? What factors affect the organisation?
Drafting -Do you draft your essay? Why/why not? How many drafts do you normally write?
Editing -Do you edit your work? How?
Language -Do you have any specific use of language difficulties (e.g. spelling, grammar etc)?
General -What other things do you do or don’t do?
Management
For an essay to be successful it must address the issue presented, identify key areas relating to that issue and provide a coherent discussion dealing with the issue.
In order to write a successful essay, apart from the requisite reading, it is essential that you understand what you are being asked to do.
Interpreting Essay Questions
When looking at essay titles it is often not easy to see exactly what is being asked. You need to identify the topic the instruction and the limitation. This is possible without substantial knowledge of the subject.
You also need to know what the assumptions are, what is significant and what the issue/problem is. In order to do this you must have knowledge of the subject and of the controversies surrounding your subject.
For example, consider the following essay title:
“Discuss the use of landscape elements in the decoration of ceramics from north China in the Song and Yuan periods.”
Discuss is the instruction, landscape elements is the topic and the limitation is ceramics, and Song & Yuan periods.
It is essential to identify all the elements surrounding an essay question to ensure that you deal with it appropriately.
Instructions
Essay questions are a way of asking you to do something specific with the things you have been studying on your course. However, they are not always presented in ways that state explicitly how you’re supposed to tackle the question.
Below is a list of some ‘key tasks’ which may or may not appear explicitly in an essay question but which will be represented by other means. These are often referred to in essay feedback and it is useful to consider what they might mean.
For instance, look at the following piece of feedback on an essay written in response to the title:
‘Assess the respective weight of reasons for the Emancipation Edict of 1861’
