Your Assignment Toolkit
Part 3: Producing your assignment
Where preparation and research turn into communication.
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This stage is about working with information and shaping ideas, and making choices about how best to communicate your learning.
While assignment types differ, the underlying processes are shared across written, reflective, presentation based, portfolio and creative assessments. This section introduces those processes and directs you to Skills Guides that support specific skills and practices.
Reading for your assignment: moving from information to understanding
Reading (or listening/watching) at this stage is purposeful and selective. You are no longer just gathering information and deciding whether to read but deciding what in the source is relevant and how it supports your assignment task. Reading can be an exciting part of your assignment and a time when you learn new ideas, find solutions, and expand your thinking through other people’s work. It can also be a challenging part; the challenge is part of your learning.
When reading (or listening/watching) for an assignment:
- Use any author-provided summaries (such as an abstract), the introduction and the conclusion, to get an overall understanding of what something is about.
- If you are looking for key ideas or keywords, using search boxes (such as Windows: CTRL+F, Mac: Command+F, iOS: Find on page; Android: Find in page) can find words quickly.
- Focus on sources that directly address your question or assignment brief, or sources that help you understand key concepts or ideas that you need to understand for the assignment.
- Identify key arguments, concepts, evidence and theoretical perspectives.
- Make notes that summarise your own understanding of the ideas rather than describe whole texts.
- Record where ideas come from so you can reference them later.
Reading feeds into thinking, writing and creating. Whether you are writing an essay, preparing presentation slides, compiling a portfolio, or producing creative work, reading and using sources helps you position your work within an academic or professional context. This is expected by most assessment descriptors at every level of study.
Key resources:
If you find reading challenging, or you are not always sure why you are reading something or where to start, active reading is an excellent reading method to use. In active reading, we choose some questions we want to find the answers to in the source and we then read with the aim of finding out those answers. With active reading, your reading has purpose and this can help with your motivation and focus. The same principle applies for listening to or watching something – engaging with the source with a purpose.
Key resources:
Some people may need more support or tools to help with reading, such as if you are disabled / have a disability. Assistive technology can help when reading is not as accessible to you as you need, including adjusting fonts and spacing, helping with contrast and colours, and more. If this sounds like you, our ‘Technology and reading’ guide is perfect for you.
Key resources:
Using AI for reading
Lots of research tools include summarising features, and AI chat bots are marketed as being good for summarising. As a student, you are expected to develop your skills in reading and summarising so it is important that you do not skip the reading part and go straight to using AI to summarise something instead.
Reading is part of how you will learn to engage directly with what other people have said and helps you to develop trust in yourself and your own judgement. Reading academic and professional writing is also important for helping you develop your own academic and professional writing style, and growing your academic, professional and technical vocabularies.
If you choose to use AI as part of your reading process, we would recommend that you read, understand and summarise your understanding using your own skills first, and only using AI after this to compare what you understood. If you use AI first, you must go back and read a source yourself — use active reading techniques to check if an AI summary was accurate.
Key resources:
Referencing the sources you use
Referencing is a way of acknowledging that you have used the ideas and work belonging to someone else. It demonstrates that you have undertaken an appropriate literature search and carried out appropriate use of sources. We reference as part of an ethical approach to giving attribution—being transparent about where and who the ideas and information we used came from.
Anytime you quote, paraphrase, or summarise something you have read/listened to/watched (such as an idea, a piece of evidence, for example) you must reference it. This is essential for academic integrity and for avoiding academic misconduct.
Your course will have expectations for which referencing style you use and this will be explained on each assignment brief. The Library provides lots of support and guidance to help you with your referencing, and you will have support classes to learn this.
Key resources:
Quick guide to citations and full references (PDF, 86.3 kB)
Referencing guides and support at Referencing
Writing and creating as a process
Producing an assignment is rarely a linear process (going from A to B, following a strict sequence). It usually involves drafting, reviewing, revising and refining.
This applies whether you are:
- Writing an essay or report
- Drafting a reflective account
- Preparing presentation content
- Developing creative or practice based work
- Assembling a portfolio with commentary or reflection
You should expect to revisit ideas, restructure sections and clarify your thinking as you go. Drafting is where understanding and critical thinking develops.
Some writers start at the beginning and write their work in order. Others write different sections and parts first (depending on what is most interesting, what ideas they had first, what seems easiest, what seems hardest, for example) and then piece and join them together. There is no single correct process to follow, so you can enjoy the writing process and find the process that works best for you.
Structure: Communicating ideas clearly
Clear structure helps your ideas make sense to the reader, viewer or audience. Structure operates at several levels.
At the smallest scale, clarity comes from how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. Usually, for academic assignments, a good rule to follow is:
- Sentences should express one clear idea
- Paragraphs should develop a single main point
- Each paragraph should connect logically to the next
As you develop in your writing style, and read a wider range of academic and professional writing, you will grow your skill in writing in more complex ways with more complex sentence structures, but your goal is always to write with clarity; your goal is to be understood.
Clear sentence and paragraph structure supports meaning in all assignment types, including reflective writing and supporting text for portfolios or presentations you will give.
Key resources:
- Study Development resources for sentences and paragraphs in Writing Essentials
The more you read academic writing, the more confident you will be in identifying and use academic sentences. Using a phrasebank of sentence starters and structures can contribute to developing your sentences in an academic way.
Key resources:
- University of Manchester Academic Phrasebank
Using AI to help with your sentences and paragraphs
Generative AI has capabilities to help with sentences and paragraphs, but it also has been known to rewrite wording, change meaning, and add new ideas during that process. We would advise against using Generative AI to create sentences and paragraphs unless your assignment brief says this is ok. However, the York St John University Guiding Principles on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (2025) states that you can ask Generative AI for feedback on your writing style and clarity (unless your assignment brief says otherwise).
Different assignments use different structures, but all benefit from clear organisation.
Examples might include:
- Introductions, main sections and conclusions (for essays and reports)
- Logical sequencing of slides or spoken sections (for presentations)
- Curated progression of artefacts and commentary (for portfolios)
- Creative work supported by organised explanations or reflections
Your structure should help the audience understand what you are doing, why, and how it meets the brief.
There are several skills guides that can help you to structure an assignment. For support with planning the overall structure of an assignment, identifying different types of paragraphs that you can use to put forward key points, produce a report, literature review or presentation, look through the resources below.
Key resources:
Using AI to help with your overall structure
Generative AI has capabilities to help with overall structure, but it also has been known to reorganise work, rewrite wording, change meaning, and add new ideas during that process. We would advise against using Generative AI to create or revise your overall structure unless your assignment brief says this is ok. However, the York St John University Guiding Principles on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (2025) states that you can ask Generative AI for feedback on an assignment structure or plan (unless your assignment brief says otherwise).
Your voice: choosing the right tone
Your academic voice is how you present ideas clearly, appropriately and confidently. Academic voice and tone includes how you communicate in written forms.
Academic voice and tone varies depending on assignment type:
- Essays and reports usually require a formal, academic tone
- Reflective assignments balance academic language with personal accounts
- Presentations may use a slightly more accessible spoken style
- Creative work may include expressive elements supported by formal commentary
In all cases, your voice and tone should be:
- Clear and purposeful
- Appropriate to the task, assignment brief and audience
- Grounded in evidence where required
Developing your own academic voice can be one of your biggest challenges when writing and presenting.
Watch ‘Academic Register’ for our introduction to an academic tone of voice/writing:
A lot of academic writing advice discourages the use of ‘I’ for assignment types such as essays and reports (for example, ‘This suggests’ instead of ‘I think this suggests’) but expects it in reflective writing and other kinds of communication. Switching between active and passive forms of writing is a skill to learn. Each new assignment will help you to learn and decide what kind of voice to use.
Key resources:
The more you read academic writing, the more confident you will be in identifying and using an academic style. Using a phrasebank of sentence starters and structures can contribute to developing an academic style.
Key resources:
Critical thinking and doing: Joining the academic conversation
Producing an assignment is not just about reporting and describing information. To meet your learning outcomes and assessment descriptors you will need to engage critically with ideas and contribute your own perspective.
This means:
- Using relevant theory
- Showing how sources and the authors who write them connect, differ or debate
- Explaining why evidence or knowledge is relevant, not just presenting it
- Making your own position clear and supported
It can be useful to think about researching your assignment as a form of conversation. You are being asked to engage with what has already been said about your topic and then to add your own voice to the conversation. When you research your topic, you are entering into a conversation that has been going on for years, if not centuries. Though the people discussing your topic may not have been in the same room (or even alive at the same time!), your sources are all participating in a conversation about your subject. It is your job to figure out what has already been said, what the points of agreement, debate and contention are, where the conversation has been and where it is going, and where your own opinion fits in.
Writing and creating your assignment is a bit like a conversation too. When you write and create, you need to organise who speaks and when, to figure out which people agree or disagree with each other, to make sure everyone gets a fair hearing, and to add your own ideas to the conversation. To do this effectively, you will need to become confident with quoting, paraphrasing, and summarising your sources.
There are three ways you can introduce the ideas of other people into your assignment. Thinking about academic writing as a conversation can help here. Sometimes you may want to let another writer “speak” directly, sometimes you may want to put their ideas into your own words, and sometimes you may simply want to give your reader a quick overview of a larger argument or discussion.
Quoting
This is where you tell your reader exactly what someone has said, word-for-word, by placing it in quotation marks with a reference. Quoting allows a source to “speak” directly in the conversation and can be useful when the wording itself is especially important, memorable, or open to analysis.
Key resources and examples:
- Cite Them Right Online: Setting out quotations
Paraphrasing
This is where you rewrite someone else’s idea in your own words and sentence structure, whilst keeping the original meaning. Paraphrasing shows that you understand the source and allows you to integrate another person’s ideas more smoothly into your own discussion and writing style.
Key resources and examples:
- Cite Them Right Online: Paraphrasing
Summarising
This is where you briefly explain the main point or overall argument of a source in your own words. A summary is shorter than the original text and focuses only on the key ideas. Summarising is useful when you want to give your reader an overview of part of the conversation before focusing on a specific point or adding your own response.
Key resources and examples:
- Cite Them Right Online: Summarising
Strong academic writing usually involves a mixture of all three of these techniques. Aim to mainly paraphrase and summarise in your own writing (to show your critical understanding), and use quotations where a writer’s exact words are important.
This is a key skill to help you write ethically with academic integrity, and to avoid plagiarising. Avoiding plagiarism helps you to avoid poor scholarship and academic misconduct.
Key resources: Avoiding Plagiarism factsheet (PDF, 0.2 MB)
Using AI to help with quoting, paraphrasing or summarising
Generative AI has capabilities to help with quoting, paraphrasing and summarising, but it also has been known to make up quotations, or incorrectly summarise or paraphrase (because it does not ‘understand’). Many assignments and module learning outomes are assessing your own ability to do this for yourself. We would advise against using Generative AI to do quoting, paraphrasing or summarising for you unless your assignment brief says this is ok. However, the York St John University Guiding Principles on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (2025) states that you can ask Generative AI to Provide an accessible summary of concepts, ideas or bodies of literature freely available online to help your understanding (unless your assignment brief says otherwise), but you should not use these directly in your assignments.
Descriptive work explains what something is.
Critical work explores how, why and so what.
Most assignments require some description as a starting point (such as presenting a fact, some evidence, a viewpoint) but will expect you to then critically engage with it to give the reader something deeper than just a description. For example, you might need to:
- Analyse
- Evaluate
- Interpret
- Apply
By doing this, critical writing will:
- Show how an idea, theory, process or argument works; or how evidence supports a claim.
- Show why an idea, theory or finding matters; or why something happens in the way it does; or why there are different strengths or limitations, or different viewpoints or experiences.
- Answer so what by exploring the consequences or implications; or show the implications of how it might affect something else such as practice, policy or future understanding of an idea.
Critical writing brings a range of sources together, along with your own, to tell your reader about what you have found in a critical way. By doing this, you are creating a new conversation between writers and the ideas that already exist, your own ideas, and giving your reader this new conversation to think about and learn from. Your lecturers often learn new things from what you write and create.
Key resources:
- Study Development resources for Critical thinking and writing
Many assignments ask you to use theory to frame your ideas or practice, analyse it, or reflect on it.
Using theory well means:
- Explaining theoretical concepts clearly
- Applying them to examples, to data or to experience
- Showing how theory helps develop understanding
This applies across essays, reflective work, presentations and portfolios.
In this resource, using paragraphs in academic writing factsheet, we explore how you can use and write about theory in academic assignments. When using theory as a lens to examine a topic, you can also apply the P.E.T.A.L paragraph model to your writing.
Key resources:
- Study Development Using Paragraphs in Academic Writing
Producing different kinds of assignments
While the core skills we have explored are shared across many assignments, different assignment formats bring other specific considerations. Below are some other common assignment types across many subject areas. We have not listed every possible assignment type here (such as subject specific assignment formats), so if your assignment type is not listed here, use your assignment brief and any supporting resources from your lecturers to help you.
These assignments combine personal experience with academic insight. Reflection should show learning, development and connection to theory. Reflective writing often follows a specific structure and approach (called a Reflective Model); your assignment brief will tell you if you need to use a specific reflective model.
Key resources:
- Study Development resources for Being reflective
Presentations usually focus on communicating ideas in a fixed period of time with clarity and relevance. They are important in both academic and professional settings. Delivering an excellent presentation requires a number of skills: researching, condensing and evaluating sources, and presenting this information in an understandable way.
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Portfolios demonstrate your progress or competence through a collection of smaller tasks, documents, or artefacts, and often chart this progress over time. They frequently include commentary on what the collection is, and your reflections are often as important as the artefacts themselves. It is important to label and title all portfolio uploads.
Key resources:
- Study Development Portfolio Resource [being uploaded shortly]
- Digital Training guide to using PebblePad and Mahara (Sharepoint)
Business reports are structured, purpose driven assignments used to inform decisions, evaluate options, make recommendations, or influence decision making. They are common in business, management and professional practice contexts.
Business reports typically:
- Are written for a specific audience and purpose
- Use clear headings and sections rather than continuous prose
- Present evidence based analysis, often supported by data
- Include tables, figures or charts where appropriate
- End with clear conclusions or recommendations linked to the analysis
Although the style differs from essays, business reports still require critical thinking, clear communication, appropriate tone and accurate referencing.
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Formatting and presenting your work: making good communication choices
Presenting your assignment clearly and consistently helps your reader focus on your ideas, not on avoidable distractions. Good presentation supports communication, reader accessibility and your professionalism, and is part of how your work is assessed under communication criteria.
Your assignment brief and discipline may include specific presentation requirements for that assessment type and the learning outcomes being assessed. Where guidance is not provided, following common academic and professional formatting conventions helps ensure your written work is clear, readable and meets university expectations.
Key resources:
Technology can often play an important role in helping us communicate clearly and effectively. The tools we use usually have lots of features that help you to create work that is easy to use, read and share. The tools we use also help us make our work accessible for disabled people. Developing your digital skills whilst creating your work can improve your assignment, your experience of creating your assignment, and provide evidence of skills that employers look for.
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Summary
Producing your assignment is an iterative process. Once ideas are shaped and communicated, the final stage is about refinement and checking, and then submission.
The next section of the Assignment Toolkit will guide you through finishing your assignment, including proofreading, revisiting referencing and preparing to submit.
