Introduction
Much of your writing will be prompted by an assignment, essay or exam question. Students often do worse than they should in examinations or when writing assignments in English in the UK, not because their writing skills are weak or because their knowledge of the subject matter is insufficient, but because they have not fully understood what they have been asked to do. To score high marks in an examination or an assignmnet, it is important to fully understand what a question or brief means and how it should be answered.
In order to understand the question it is useful to analyse the questions and to search for certain components. The following technique is very useful (Swales, 1982).