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Since generative writing tools became widely available, universities have been scrambling to work out what to do about them. Students, meanwhile, are getting anxious about work they wrote themselves being flagged as machine-written. Both worries are reasonable. Here is what AI detection at university actually involves, what the tools can and cannot tell, and what …

A research proposal is a short document with an outsized job. It decides whether you get to do the project you want, whether you get the supervisor you want, and in some cases whether you get funded at all. Most rejected proposals are not rejected because the idea was bad. They are rejected because the …

You have finished the essay. Now you have to reference it, and you are staring at a handbook that says “Harvard” while the example you found online looks nothing like the one your friend on a different course was given. You are not going mad. The confusion around Harvard vs APA referencing is real, and …

It is the question every student asks their supervisor, and the answer is almost always some version of “as long as it needs to be” — which is true, and completely useless when you are staring at a word count. So here is a more practical answer to how long should a literature review be, …

Most students find the methodology the hardest chapter to start. You know what you did. Writing it down in a way that satisfies a marker is a different problem, and it is where a lot of otherwise good dissertations quietly lose marks. The good news is that a dissertation methodology chapter is one of the …