how to write an essay in geography

How to master A Level Geography 20-mark essay questions

Study Skills

How to master A Level Geography 20-mark essay questions

What should I do before attempting an A Level Geography 20-mark essay question?

Should i plan an a level geography 20-mark essay, how should i structure an a level geography 20-mark essay.

As we run up to exam season, many of you will now be completing your NEAs (non-examined assessment) and exam content, and starting to focus on exam technique. You may be thinking about how you will tackle the dreaded 20-mark essay questions . Essay questions are very much like marmite for students. Some love them as they get the chance to explore key geographic theories and showcase their knowledge and understanding, which may not be possible in lower-stakes questions. However, others may struggle to formulate their geographic ideas or structure them in a way that makes a convincing argument.

In my experience, all A Level geography students must be systematic and structured in the way they write their long-form answers. This approach ensures that students cover all the necessary content while also demonstrating the geographic skills that examiners are assessing.

Examiners use both AO1 and AO2 to evaluate students in essay questions. AO1 requires students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of places, environments, concepts, processes, interactions and change at various scales. AO2 deals with the application of knowledge and understanding in different contexts to interpret, analyse, and evaluate geographical information and issues. The strongest students can produce answers that balance the two aspects in their responses. If you weigh your answers too far toward knowledge recall and simply state facts, figures, and case study knowledge without doing anything with the knowledge (this is where command words are essential), you will not be able to achieve the highest levels described in the level descriptors.

Before you attempt essay questions, I suggest you take a look at the mark schemes for some past paper questions. It is important to focus on the level descriptors as these are what the examiners will use to assess your answers. Pay attention to the language they use to describe what they are looking for, and when you start your attempts, consider whether your language and writing style match the descriptors. The exam board mark schemes are available on the PMT A Level Geography past papers webpage .

Another place to look before attempting essay questions is the assessed sample answers produced by the exam boards (e.g. AQA Paper 1 Hazards Example Responses ). These are available on the exam board websites and show a range of pupil responses to exam questions. They come with a helpful commentary that explains how the pupils gained marks, highlights the importance of a well-structured response, and provides insight into what examiners are looking for when assessing your answers.

Where to start – command words

As mentioned above, it is very important for students to be systematic in their approach to answering 20 markers. The first thing students need to understand is the command word . Without knowledge of what the command word means and what it is asking you to do, you will not be able to fully engage with the question. To find out the meaning of different command words , you should visit your exam board’s website and look in the specification.

Essay questions tend to use the command words “to what extent” or “assess” . According to AQA, if the question includes the “to what extent” command word, you should “Consider several options, ideas or arguments and come to a conclusion about their importance/success/worth”. On the other hand, if it is an “assess” question, you should “use evidence to weigh up the options to determine the relative significance of something. Give balanced consideration to all factors and identify which are the most important.”

BUG the question

Command words can help guide you in how to structure your answers and the skills you need to exhibit. During KS3 and KS4, you may have been told to BUG the question, where B stands for box the command work , U for underline key terms , and G for glance back at the question .

I would encourage all A Level students to continue to use this strategy, even for longer essay questions. It will help ensure that you are answering the question you are being asked, rather than the question you wish you were being asked.

Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.

It is crucial for all students to plan their essay writing before they start answering a question. An essay question requires you to write for a sustained period, and if you don’t have a clear plan for what you’re going to write, you may lose focus on your points and arguments and not fully answer the question.

I suggest that all A Level students write a brief plan before attempting the question . This plan should outline the introduction, including key terms to define and any case studies to introduce, the main argument in each of your paragraphs, and finally, the contents of your conclusion. Spending just five minutes on this will save you time in the long run and help keep you on track to answering the question fully.

Students in uniform sitting an exam in the school hall.

A good structure is key to success in essay writing. A clear structure enables you to answer the question coherently and reduces the chance that you will lose the key focus of your points. All of the exam boards recommend following the structure outlined below:

Introduction

Main body of the answer (three to four key arguments)

In academia, this is sometimes known as the hourglass essay . An hourglass essay starts with a big idea, narrows down to a specific question, and then widens back out to explain why that specific question is important in the grand scheme of things.

The introduction of your essay should account for approximately 10% of the total essay length , and it’s an excellent opportunity for you to impress the examiner. Your essay introduction should give a broad view of the essay themes and provide a definition of the key terms that you have underlined in your question. It is also the place to introduce a case study location . A strong start to your essay is crucial as it demonstrates to the examiner that you have a clear understanding of the geographic content you’ve been studying.

Once you have written your introduction, you can then get on to answering the questions. While the introduction mainly covers AO1 (knowledge and understanding of geography), the main body of your answer should cover both AO1 and AO2 (analysis and evaluation in the application of knowledge and understanding).

As before, the way you structure the main body of your answer is very important, and you must form your points clearly and coherently. During my teaching and tutoring, I have seen many ways of forming these arguments/points, but the two most effective methods I have seen are using PEEL or PEACE paragraphs .

E xplanation
A pplication

Teacher teaching creating writing skills.

Everyone is different, and everyone has their unique writing style. My advice to all A Level students is to try both methods when beginning to tackle essay questions and determine which one works best for you. I would also recommend completing PEEL/PEACE paragraphs and asking for feedback from your teacher or tutor.

The main body of the essay should consist of three to four arguments that cover the views for the specific question. Those who can link back to the question but also between their paragraphs will have the best chance of performing well in their essay questions.

After completing the main body, you now need to finish your essay with a conclusion. Just like the introduction, this should be roughly 10% of the total essay length . The main aim of the conclusion is to bring your essay to a close and essentially answer the question you have been asked. In the conclusion, you should summarise your argument and avoid introducing any new information . It is simply a chance to express your own thoughts and opinions while bringing your essay to a close.

The quality of a conclusion is often a key indicator of the overall quality of an essay. Although it is a short section of the whole piece of writing, it provides a platform to showcase several important geographic skills such as analysis, summarising, and creating synoptic links .

Overall, it is very important that you give yourself enough time to complete your essay questions during your examinations and that you follow the structures discussed above. If you follow these guidelines, you will see an improvement in the quality of your essay responses.

If you’re in Year 13 and in need of additional help, PMT Education runs Geography A Level Easter Crash Courses for AQA and Edexcel . Whether you need support with exam technique or want to revise key sections of the syllabus with the help of an experienced tutor, these courses will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to excel in your summer exams.

Dave is a qualified teacher with 10 years of experience teaching GCSE and A Level Geography. He has worked as an assistant faculty leader for Humanities and a professional mentor for new and trainee teachers. He has also been involved with the supervision and guidance of NEAs. Dave currently works in higher education and trains geography teachers across the North West of England. He is also a tutor at PMT Education , with experience running highly successful geography courses .

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Writing in Geography and Urban Planning

This resource provides a brief introduction to writing in the field of Geography and Urban Planning through the lens of threshold concepts.

What is Geography?

Geography integrates the study of people, places, and environments to better understand the world and improve decision-making in sustainable development, urban and regional planning, and geospatial science.

Geography is literally and figuratively a worldview—exploring space, place, landscape, region, and environment—to better understand our changing planet, communicate that understanding, and apply it to decision-making. The geographical perspective is integrative but is focused through specialized subfields like urban geography, cultural/development geography, biogeography, and physical geography, among others. These differ in their object of study, methodology, regional focus, and application, and align with professional fields like urban planning, sustainable development, and environmental science.

Geographical research methods are also integrative yet diverse. They can be qualitative or quantitative (or a mix), including: field measurement and landscape interpretation; surveys and interviews; remote sensing, archival research, and content analysis; and geospatial analysis and mapping. Data sources or methods depend on the kind of research questions asked and who the intended audience is.

People are surprised both by the interdisciplinary breadth of geographical thinking and its relevance to understanding and impacting the world through fields like planning, sustainable development, and geospatial science. While geographers and planners are diverse, they share an emphasis on some key ideas (or threshold concepts):

spatial processes and patterns are interdependent and linked across scales;
landscapes and environments are dynamic across time and space;
places reflect and reinforce patterns of unevenness and inequality; and
individual actions have the power to transform the world.

But each geographical subfield also has its own threshold concepts. Human/social geographers emphasize the social production of space, development geographers the unevenness of development, physical geographers the dynamism of environmental processes and change, and urban geographers the mutually reinforcing link between transportation and land use.

Geographers and planners are united by many core values like the importance of curiosity and exploration, integrative thinking about interconnected phenomena, reflexivity and self awareness, engaging diverse people and places and the problems they face, and the power of the visual and graphical communication. Geographical thinking values synthesis over reductionism. And while many use laboratory or archival methods, field research is a priority. Because geography is so diverse, debates inevitably arise around differences in theories and methods as well as relative merits of different approaches (physical sciences vs. social science vs. humanism, etc.). But we value such diversity and debates, and pride ourselves in our ability to communicate across sub-disciplinary boundaries.

What Do Geographers and Planners Value in Writing?

Our values, goals, threshold concepts, and methods of study are all embodied in what and how we write.

We communicate—textually and often graphically—in genres like:

place-based description/field reporting , including site reports, landscape interpretations, map and geovisual description and interpretation, travel writing and journalistic reporting, or existing conditions analysis;
graphical thinking and communication , including maps, visual renderings, multimedia website, video, and diagrams, etc.;
independent research , including literature reviews, research papers, scholarly articles and monographs;
professional, collaborative reports , which include policy analyses/white papers, reports, and plans; and
public communications , including presentations, posters, social media posts, and written correspondence.

The writing processes within each genre can vary:

When reviewing literature we identify a topic scope, keywords, and research question. Searching for relevant sources by keyword is followed by a summary of individual sources and synthesis—seeing connections and contrasts, putting individual sources in context. We construct a narrative about the state of current knowledge and ongoing debates.
Analyzing geographic phenomena entails identifying a research question; synthesizing relevant literature; systematically applying an appropriate research method to gather data; and presenting, analyzing, and summarizing findings.
When writing plans or reports we define a problem and goals, review existing literature and knowledge (typically including best practices), evaluate alternative problem-solving strategies, and suggest policy solutions.
Communicating graphically includes the visual depiction of spatial data or analysis through tools like mapping, artistic rendering, or diagramming. This involves choices about symbolic representation, and information to help viewers interpret them (e.g., map descriptions and keys).
When presenting to wider audiences we make careful choices about how to concisely organize complex information for particular audiences, including choices about appropriate media and presentation styles.

What Makes Good Writing in Geography and Urban Planning?

In general, geographers and planners value writing that is clear and understandable. We look for logical structure, active voice, a sense of place, carefully framing and contextualization, support through visually rich (where relevant) evidence, and demonstration of methodical analysis and communication rooted in evidence. We also want to see authors acknowledge the limitations of their individual perspective.

As an integrated social and natural science, professional writers in our field must provide evidence for their claims. We gather data from across the world—whether that be field measurements or archived texts—to draw conclusions and develop recommendations. Professional writers in our field are credible when they:

outline a compelling and relevant topic;
acknowledge and cite current knowledge and debates;
outline a clear methodology, whether qualitative and/or quantitative;
communicate concisely and illustrate their claims with evidence; and
draw conclusions or make recommendations grounded in evidence.

They are often not seen as credible when they do not or are not able to include supporting evidence.

The citation practices we use in our field also embody our goals, values, and conventions. In the Department of Geography, we primarily use author-date in-text citation style(s), which puts authors more front-and-center than in other fields. Often we chose the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style, simply because it is widely used and documented.

In some cases, plan and report writers will use note-based styles like footnotes. This places the bibliographic information below the cited information on the same page, so that it’s easy for the reader to refer to. We discourage the use of endnote-based styles, since they place key bibliographic information at the end where it is slower to access.

Whatever the citation style, whenever you make written claims that depend on outside information, you must cite the source(s) of that information. Readers must be able to quickly understand where you are getting information from. This requires:

citing the source immediately upon first reference to that data;
using textual cues in the same paragraph to make clear that information that follows also comes from the same source, but otherwise not repeating the same citation multiple times in the same paragraph;
and including the page numbers if quoting material from a text with pages.

Keep in mind, however, that geographers and planners cite a wide range of data, including:

demographic or economic development statistics from the United Nations, World Bank, or US Census Bureau;
maps and geovisual representations of data;
arguments from scholars and other experts about the state of knowledge that frames our work conceptually;
interviews, portions of which we will often incorporate as quotations in social scientific and humanities-based work;
various kinds of documents (including historical) that more humanities-oriented geographers in particular will incorporate, often as quotations to evaluate more subjective ideas, opinions, and reflections.

When deciding when to paraphrase versus directly quote information, generally you should only quote if the source of the quote is particularly significant and the specific wording strengthens the clarity of your claims. Like most disciplines, we prefer you explicitly specify in the text the quotation source, rather than to use “blind” quotes.

We follow all of these guidelines because this is how we document the evidence that supports strong arguments, and without it, we have no real basis for our claims.

How Do We Incorporate Writing in Our Courses?

Because writing styles and genres vary across Geography and Urban Planning, students develop different writing skills across the curriculum. Our major curricula prioritizes good written and graphical communication, but developing those skills happens in different ways in different classes.

Undergraduates taking Miami Plan or electives in the Department of Geography should recognize the interdisciplinary and space/place grounding in our writing and try to understand this when they write for us. We think this will be useful to them later even if they are not our majors because this framing will help to broaden their world view.
Undergraduate majors in Urban and Regional Planning or Geography and Sustainable Development should recognize spatial reasoning and evidence-based arguments and try to practice integrative thinking and analytical reasoning when they write. Over time they will need to become skilled at posing, answering, and communicating geographic research questions to prepare them for career success, lifelong learning, and informed civic engagement.
Graduate students in Geography should recognize the disciplinary and scholarly underpinnings of our writing and must learn to articulate geo-spatial relationships when they write for us. By graduation, they need to be able to design and carry out an independent thesis-driven research project to prepare them for professional advancement and career success.

Overall, when students are learning to write and read in our field, they will benefit from a better understanding for the dynamism of human and physical relationships over time and space.