1. Critically examine the conditions under which HR strategy may help a firm secure competitive advantage.

Brief notes on writing assignments…

Here is a summary of common problems found in assignments from previous years, which should help you to improve your own writing.

Do read the question carefully, and answer the question set (not one that you wish had been set). Please avoid excessive description – your assignment should aim to give a succinct, relevant and analytical answer. Many questions have more than one part to them, so do make sure you answer all the parts or you will lose marks for incompletion. Do keep to the word limit.

Assignments should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Many assignments either begin or end abruptly (or sometimes both), without any introduction or conclusion.

Many assignments have hasty or rushed conclusions, suggesting a lack of pacing and/or editing. Please allow yourself space to develop adequate conclusions.

Once you have completed your assignment, you must proof read it carefully. Many assignments contain misspellings, incorrect punctuation, ungrammatical sentence constructions, poor paragraphing and so on. At best, this looks shoddy and rushed but at worst it leads to incomprehensible English, for which you will lose marks. Bear in mind that any employer will expect correct English from you, so get in the habit of proofing your own work now.

Please do not rely on lecture notes for your assignments, but go back to original sources – evidence of wide reading will gain better marks.

Quoting encyclopaedias or dictionaries is questionable, but quoting Wikipedia is not permissible. The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, which means that you are likely to risk acquiring inaccurate material from it. This is an inadequate source on which to base an assignment.

Many assignments have problems with quotations and bibliographies. Use the Harvard system of quotation, as reflected in your core text book. A quotation should give the name of the author, the date of publication and – if applicable – the page reference for the quotation itself. For example, if the quotation comes from p.101 of a book by Smith (2012), then the reference should say ‘Smith (2012: 101)’.

Bibliographies should give all references, with name of the author (in alphabetical order by family name), date of publication, title of the work, the publisher and place of publication and, in the case of websites, the date of accessing. Articles and books obviously require slightly different details. If in doubt, just use any of your core text books as a model. Failure to reference properly will lose marks. The following show how an article, book, chapter and website respectively should be referenced:

Sherman, R. (2011) ‘Beyond interaction: customer influence on housekeeping and room service work in hotels.’ Work, Employment and Society 25(1): 19–33.

Ghoshal, S. and Bartlett, C. (2002) Managing across Borders. The Transnational Solution, London: Random House.

Morgan, G. (2005) ‘Multinationals and Work’, in S. Ackroyd, R. Batt, P. Thompson and P. S. Tolbert (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organisation, Oxford University Press.

BEIS (2016) Corporate Governance Reform. Green Paper (November). London: Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/584013/corporate-governance-reform-green-paper.pdf (accessed 21 September 2018).

You must cite a source for everything that is not your own idea. Unattributed quotations are a form of plagiarism, and any form of plagiarism – copying material that is not your own without adequate attribution – will lead to serious consequences.

Please read your Student Handbook for further guidance on plagiarism, or feel free to ask us if you are still unclear.