4.5.3 Practising for your TMA

• Practising for your TMA

  1. Identify key points

  2. Write a document

  3. Further investigation
• For TM111, and throughout your studies, you will be expected to write pieces of text as part of your TMAs, and you will often need to search for information sources as part of this writing task
• This section gives you the opportunity to work through a sample TMA question, whilst talking you through the important stages involved
• Identifying key points


  The first stage for a writing question is to identify key points that you need to include, or questions that your written document needs to answer
• Wikipedia is often a good place to begin researching a topic. Many of its articles are of high quality and are up to date. However, because Wikipedia is created by independent contributors, articles can be poorly researched, incomplete or biased
• For assessment questions asking you to research a topic, it can be helpful to start with Wikipedia, but you should not limit your searches to that site
• Writing a document


  1. The next stage of writing is turning the notes into a complete document

  2. Use word counts as a guide to your progress
• When writing your TMA answers: write complete sentences, rather than just repeating your working notes; keep to the topic of the question; explain any technical terms; spell-check your document and correct any errors; include an accurate word count at the end
• Further investigation


  You will often need to look through additional articles and sources of information to investigate the topic further