An academic assignment is assessed on the basis of a number of criteria. At an early stage in your writing process, you should familiarise yourself with the criteria on which your assignment will ultimately be assessed. For example, you can: 

• Check the learning objectives in your academic regulations 

• Talk to your supervisor or teacher about any specific formal requirements. 

• Read about academic standards under scientific quality. 

• Read more about exam requirements. 

• You should also be aware of deadlines for exam registration and submission, as well as any practical information about the oral defence of the assignment, if relevant. 

Take charge of your writing process by considering and reflecting on how you work best. 

It’s a good idea to think about how you intend to go about writing your assignment, and whether you want to integrate specific work processes. It can also be helpful to reflect on your process as you go along and on whether some of your working methods can be improved.  

Planning your writing process will give you an overview of the most important tasks and stages of the writing process. Planning can include adjustments and editing of the text, feedback from others, ongoing deadlines, and the collection of empirical data. Below are some specific suggestions for how to plan your writing process. 

What you write in connection with your assignment serves different purposes: Sometimes you write stuff that’s meant to form part of the actual assignment, and sometimes you write simply to remember or reflect on something.  

Your writing process will involve different ways of writing, and you will most likely write more text than you will use in the final assignment. But this is a necessary part of the process and of selecting what is most important to include in the assignment. 

Text is often written and edited in bursts: You write a few sentences, delete something, then write a bit more because you’re trying to simultaneously figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it. 

But it's better to do one thing at a time. This will make your writing more manageable and efficient. 

Free writing is an efficient writing method that you can use when writing academic assignments. 

Free writing is uninterrupted speed writing where you use writing as a tool for thinking. It’s a method that can help you produce text in a focused and efficient way - at any time and without feeling inspired. Free writing can be used to: 

• start writing early in the process. 

• prevent and overcome writer’s block. 

• give the text focus. 

• solve problems during the writing process. 

Free writing exercise 

How to perform the exercise  

1. Select a topic you want to write about and decide how long you want to write. You can write about anything you like – for example, a specific section for your assignment, or thoughts about your topic in order to get closer to a problem statement. 

2. Write for the selected interval at high speed. You are writing in a black field so you cannot see your own text - that’s part of the exercise. The purpose is to help you focus on producing text without spending time correcting the text. 

3. Focus on keeping your fingers moving so you don’t get stuck. Above the black field, you can see the time that has elapsed since the last keystroke. Keep the status bar from turning red by writing filler words until you come up with something relevant - which you will. 

4. Utilise the time. You’ll get more out of the exercise if you utilise all the time allocated for writing. But if necessary, you can stop the exercise before time is up. 

5. Edit your text once the exercise is over: correct typos, insert line breaks and correct spelling mistakes. 

6. Copy your text, paste it into your assignment, and then continue working on it. 

What are you going to write about? 

Usually, your free writing will have something to do with your assignment or an academic topic: What are you going to write about in your assignment, which problem statement are you going to work with, how are you going to move on with a chapter? You can familiarise yourself with the free writing method by writing about any topic that you have just a little knowledge about. In the interactive free writing exercise, you can come up with a topic yourself or you can choose one from a list of options. 

What to do if you get stuck? 

It’s important not to stop the free writing exercise even if you cannot think of anything more to write. Instead, write that you have run out of ideas, or try to write the keyword a few times. If you continue writing, new ideas will often emerge after some time. Things that you would not have thought of if you had stopped the exercise. 

Try again 

For some, producing text without editing it simultaneously is a major challenge. Try it a few times and see how your text and writing develop. Like most other things, free writing is something you can learn. 

Once you have become familiar with the method, you can use it when writing assignments. Create a document in your word processor, turn off the screen, set an alarm, and start writing. You can also do free writing by hand. 

The dice method can help you sharpen your focus and direction and make you clearer about the message and aim of your assignment. 

It can be a good tool for generating new ideas, producing material for the assignment, and getting started with your writing. The dice method is based on the idea that you can study a topic by looking at it from different angles, and it’s an effective way to develop new ideas and insights. By moving forward systematically and looking at your topic from one angle at a time, you may get new ideas for your topic and see it from different perspectives. 

The method formulates six different angles from which you can approach your topic, and it can be used: 

• To make sure all ideas – both good ones and bad ones – are part of the work process from an early stage and are considered potential approaches to the topic. 

• To clarify the most interesting aspect about your topic and thereby help you develop a problem statement. 

• To get started with the descriptive, analytical and argumentative sections of the assignment. 

• To generate new ideas or perspectives on a topic if you get stuck. 

• To add more nuances to what you already know and thereby give you new material to work with.

Do the dice method

 How to perform the exercise 

The exercise takes 15-30 minutes. The aim is to generate new ideas and insights about your topic. 

1. Choose a topic. 

2. Spend 3-6 minutes on each side of the die and write down everything that comes to mind. 

3. Edit your text once the exercise is over: correct typos, insert line breaks and correct spelling mistakes. 

4. Copy your text, paste it into your assignment, and then continue working on it.