How to Write Better Essays

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9 The range of abilities

In this chapter you will learn:

• that university education is less preoccupied with learning and
  recalling the facts, than with developing the skills and abilities that
  are crucial to your subject;


• the importance of adjusting to a different style of learning at university;


• about the range of abilities the essay is designed to assess.

It’s at this point that most of our problems in studying begin. Although

we will talk about this again later when we come to the writing stage,

it’s worth confronting it twice, so important is the problem.

Most students at university are handicapped in one form or another

by the restricted notion of education they bring with them. Unfortu-

nately, we spend most of our time in schools believing that education

is largely about ‘knowing things’, that a clever person is one who can

remember a vast number of isolated facts. If you spend, say, 13 years

in compulsory education from the age of 5 to 18, during at least 11 of

these you come to believe that education is largely, if not solely, con-

cerned with learning the facts of every subject you study, dispensed by

the authorities of education, the teachers and the textbooks.

This perception of education is reinforced not just by the syllabuses

we study, the examinations we take and the teaching styles of some of

our teachers, but by a whole range of social and cultural conventions,

not least the ever popular TV quiz show, in which contestants are asked

to recall isolated items of information.

A passive style of learning

The result is that we all assume a passive style of learning. We sit

silently in class absorbing the truths, the right answers that we come

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