How to Write Better Essays

(a) Official authority – institutional power

e.g. the police

We accept this sort of power as authority, maybe because of

(i) our respect for the institution

or, when this fails, e.g. an inner-city ethnic community

feels unfairly targeted by the police,

(ii) because of our fear of the consequences

(b) Unofficial authority – ‘Might is Right’

e.g. the local gang leader

Their influence over the local community may be due to

(i) respect for individual leaders

or

(ii) more likely it’s due to fear of the consequences of going

against their will, e.g. protection rackets

Answer

As this suggests, one way in which we understand the concept of

authority is represented by the institutional power of officials like

police officers, whose authority lies largely in their power to make

things worse for us if we don’t comply with their orders.

2 The development

Once you’ve established in the topic sentence the relevance of the

topic you’re going to be dealing with in the paragraph, the examiner

can get down to assessing the quality of your work. It is here in the

development that you show the examiner you are capable of the sort

of intellectual processing that was called for in the question by

the ‘instructional verb’ (see Chapter 8).

At this point it’s worth reminding ourselves of the issues we raised

when we first examined this. You’ll remember we pointed out that all

syllabuses are written in the context of six ‘cognitive domains’ – six

intellectual abilities, ranging from the simplest, ‘recall’, to the more

complex abilities, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

Again, as we pointed out then, most of our problems, both in

writing and in our study skills, begin here. We wrongly assume that

education is exclusively concerned with the possession of knowl-

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