China's military is growing fast. But is chinaan emerging military threat to western strategic interests?

China's military is growing fast. But is chinaan emerging military threat to western strategic interests? 1. Ensure you conduct sufficient background research in the library and additional resource points: the list reflects your breadth and depth of reading and research capability. Remember, this is also about developing ‘skills’ – and a major skill is the demonstrable ability to identity, collect, evaluate information and then use it appropriately in your essay. 2. Obviously a paper with limited citations is not going to do well because there is not a great deal of information available to build your study. Also, the frequent use of one or two cited works rather than the breadth of cited works suggest an over-reliance on these and need for wider corroboration. 3. Showing you have a grasp of the key debates and issues, setting the context, 4. It is also important to use theory and methodology. Identify an appropriate conceptual approach and then apply it through a methodological framework for analysis. 5. There must be a coherent structure to the paper. It must hang together and your conceptual and analytical approaches will help to do this. Try and avoid your paper being fragmented, rather aim for a flow through the paper from your initial questions through analysis to conclusion. 6. You must avoid simple historical narratives – often essays are chronological – ‘this happened then this was followed by …’ - this might be useful for you as you get to grips with what happened but not really a big part of your essay. 7. A central argument is also helpful. Try toargue a case. 8. Referencing: make sure that where you refer to information; authors, statistics, reports, etc. that you make sure these are referenced with either an endnote in the Harvard System– if not then they stand merely as assertions/opinions rather than substantiated points of argument. 9. Presentation and style – essays must be double-spaced; have margins running down both sides of text; the bibliographycan begin on a separate page following the end of the essay and endnotes.