Preparing work
Long format answers:
Developing good written communication to lay out cogent scientific arguments is an essential part of the Earth Sciences degree, and a very valuable skill more generally beyond academia. Feedback on supervision work provides the key opportunity for you to hone your writing skills. There is also a great article on the science of scientific writing by George Gopen and Judith Swan, which you can find online here, or a pdf here.
Structure: Your essays do not need elaborate introductions or conclusions, but a short introduction defining key terms and explaining what you are going to consider in your answer (perhaps with some critical analysis to suggest which processes/observations etc. are most important for the question at hand) is welcome.
Do include sub-headings to organise your answer, especially where your answer is naturally organised into different blocks, as it would be if you were giving three main pieces of evidence in support of something, for example.
Length: In the 1A exam at the end of the year you have ~36 minutes per essay. For most people this translates to 2-4 sides of text and figures. You should expect to cover about this many sides of A4 with text and figures in your supervision essays, although with researching from your lecture notes and from recommended reading, it will take longer to write.
Preparation: If you will be handwriting essays in the exam at the end of the year, please also handwrite your essays and hand draw any figures/graphs that you want to include for the supervisions. It is important to maintain practice at hand drafting your essays during the year if this is how you are going to be assessed.
Calculations:
Again, I would recommend the doing the work handwritten. In the case of calculation work, this is mainly because it would be inordinately awkward to appropriately typeset the maths describing your workings.
Thin sections and rock descriptions:
I have produced a short guide for thin section and hand specimen descriptions that goes into more detail. In brief, it is best practice to make the annotated drawing on one blank page of A4 and then further written observations and inferences on a second page. Use colour, shading, differing line weights etc., to best communicate the optical differences between minerals.
Where and when to hand work in
Where: Please scan all work and place it in the onedrive folder assigned to you (via your crsid).
When: Work needs to be submitted by 5pm the day before the supervision. Late work will not be marked.
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