negotiation

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How many words should my essay be?

The essay limit is 3,000 words. If you’re slightly under or over, it’s not a big deal. I care more about assessing the quality of your analysis than the number of words you used.

That being said, if you’re significantly under the word count and your analysis lacks detail, you will lose some marks.

2. How many references should I have?

Students have earned very high marks without referencing any outside material. The point of the essay is to show you’ve thought and reflected on your strengths and weaknesses and to analyse negotiations (in class or real life) using the concepts we learned in class.

If referencing some outside readings forces you to apply the concepts we learned, then this is great. However, I won’t be counting whether people have a certain number of references. Again, I’m more concerned with the quality of your analysis than how many citations you used.

3. Do I need to reference the slides from class?

No, you do not. However, if you are using a particular concept in your analysis (e.g., interests/rights/power), you could indicate in parentheses which workshop the concept was introduced (Workshop 3) just to show that you are referring a concept from class.

4. How should I organise my essay?

People have organised their essay in different ways. One way is to structure your essay by having strengths first, then weaknesses. Under each strength or weakness, you can analyse activities from class in order to explain the strengths or weakness.

Instead of structuring your essay by each strengths or weakness, you could also organise your essay by class activity. For each negotiation activity you include in your essay, you can analyse it using concepts/ideas from the module and explain your strengths or weaknesses that relate to the activity.

5. How many activities/negotiations should I include?

There’s no correct number. However, keep in mind that if you only talk about 1 or 2 negotiations from class, you will need to go into significant detail when analysing the examples and you’ll need to identify multiple strengths and weaknesses from just these 1 or 2 activities.

However, if you include 6 or more activities, you run the risk of not analysing any of the negotiations in enough detail.

6. What are the biggest mistakes people make?

The biggest mistake people make is just describing or summarising information rather than analysing. Don’t just describe what took place in a negotiation or give definitions of concepts that came straight from the slides.

Another mistake people make is to not reference any of the negotiations we did in class. It’s very important that I know with absolute certainty that YOU wrote your own essay. If I suspect you didn’t write your own essay, I will initiate the academic misconduct process.

Lastly, the essay is supposed to be about your personal strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, you should NOT write an essay that talks about how to be a good negotiator in general. Your essay should very much be unique to you.