Experienced English Literature lecturer (Cambridge PhD) offering secondary and university-level teaching

Rhiannon is an extremely bright first-year English student, who needed some feedback on her very first essay and advice on how to manage time around writing assignments. Rhiannon's writing is highly promising, with her essay already in the high 2.1 band. Her close reading of the Plath passage showed a great deal of insight, strong analytical skills, good use of technical terms and tremendous nuance. I advised her that structuring her work around an argument and building the essay up around this more systematically and consistently, together with tidying up referencing and formualting a clearer and more articulate introduction and conclusion, will help advance her mark into the first class category. We also discussed a few techniques for making essay preparation and writing more time-efficient and task-focused, balancing this carefully again the need to do meticulous research and careful note-taking. Iris strikes me as an ambitious and high-achieving student with high expectations toward herself. I have every confidence in her ability to get the high marks with slightly less time and effort as she gradually develops more routine around academic writing over time.

Phil is a very motived Master's student, who already has pretty solid academic writing skills and is able to handle complex critical sources competently. Phil is good at understanding the main arguments and conclusions of the academic articles that he reads, which is clearly communicated in his writing. Phil will need to make sure that he clearly responds to the assessment brief and responds to all the points raised there. He needs to show more evidence of the knowledge of the field by incorporating further sources. He also needs to make sure that he writes a critical evaluation of his chosen source - as described in the brief - rather than simply a summary.