Do you want to know how to write an essay, make the most of your lectures, take useful notes, use the library, manage your time?

Indeed, would you like to know "how to get a first"? That is the title of an excellent guide by Thomas Dixon, who has supervised undergraduates at Cambridge and now teaches history at Lancaster. It is a compilation of what he wishes he had known before he went to university.

The point of lectures, he says, is not to give students the answers but to alert them to the important questions. Essays should be well-informed, argumentative, written in plain English and backed up with evidence. Writing a good one, he says, is "the most underrated and underdeveloped, and yet the most important of academic skills".

How to Get a First is published by Routledge and costs £11.99.

John Clare
Daily Telegraph: "Any questions?"
28th October 2004