How to Write an Accounting Essay

When writing a successful accounting essay it is essential that you follow certain processes to help you reach your end goals, whilst at the same time demonstrating that you are comfortable with the key concepts of your study, and that you are capable of producing a confident piece of academic research and writing. You need to ensure that your accounting essay is both stylistically impressive and devoid of easily avoidable mistakes.

A good idea is to begin by reading another accounting essay to gauge what might be required from your piece of work. Copies of accounting essays and dissertations are usually available in University libraries. Next you need to work out what it is that the essay question is asking by looking at what the key words in the question are. In your accounting essay you are looking to carry out a sustained study of a specific topic, and therefore this topic must be well researched. When writing your accounting essay your aim is to both expand and deepen your knowledge of that subject.

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When approaching your accounting essay it is important to work out a timetable, and then religiously stick to it. This will be an insurance against things going unexpectedly wrong, and will give you plenty of time to get hold of your appropriate source materials. You will also need time to thoroughly proof read your essay once you have finished.

Finally your accounting essay should be clearly referenced. It is very important that the style of referencing should be thoroughly consistent throughout. Referencing is important for many reasons, specifically to avoid any accusations that your work is plagiarised, whilst poor referencing can also lead to docked marks.

When undertaking the writing of your accounting essay it is important for you to pace yourself properly. Therefore you can avoid a panic in the final few days, and can give yourself time to fully reflect on your research. Another important step when writing your accounting essay is to determine what kind of analysis you are being asked to make, and to look in-depth at the concepts you are writing about. Ideally your accounting essay should be a sustained argument, and your accounting essay is a test of independent thought, with independent enquiry into the topic essential.

It is also vital that have familiarity with the appropriate research methods needed. A successful accounting essay should be full of analysis, of critical evaluation and of discussion of your topic. Your accounting essay is a test of test your ability to present a sustained academic argument in clear and logical prose.

When tackling the writing of your essay you should write little and often, and in short chunks. Your accounting essay should follow a logical structure. It is often a good idea to write the body of your essay before writing the introduction and conclusion. In this way you can develop what you intend to say in your introduction before writing it. This is important as your introduction is often the most vital part of your work. In the main body of your essay, each paragraph should be based on a separate but related aspect of the main topic of the essay, and then the conclusion should be a summation of your argument.

Stylistically it is vitally important that you avoid colloquialisms or sloppy grammar in your accounting essay. You should also ensure that you stick to the central thread of your argument. Your text should be easily navigable for the reader with obvious ‘signposts’. When writing you should try to avoid personal language such as ‘I’ as far as possible. When using long quotations of four lines or more you should indent on the left hand side of the page. You shouldn’t rely overly on your source material, as this does not go far enough to show independent, original thought.

These facts should be kept in mind when writing your accounting essay.

Questions

1. Discuss the state of the world accounting system with reference to intangible assets and the related processes such as amortisation and capitalisation. How far is the worldwide divergence in accounting systems problematic? How realistic are balance sheets compared with the actual financial picture? What solutions are there?

2. Bearing in mind the attached accounting spreadsheets and other information would you recommend investing in Burnfish plc. Bear in mind issues potentially relating to off balance sheet assets. Also bear in mind the current financial climate. Give your answer in reference to three other recent takeovers in Britain.

3. Discus the relative merits of three types of pricing systems used for materials.

4. ‘The traditional system of book-keeping, created by an Italian renaissance monk, is wholly inadequate to the demands of the new weightless economy

We live in a world awash with numbers that mean almost nothing. The service sector, public and private, dominates the British economy. The most important assets of any service business are intangible: its people, their skills, a brand image. Those are the assets that provide a service business with its competitive advantage and reputation. You do not judge the Carphone Warehouse by the quality of its buildings or the state of the carpets. Yet those are the assets that are recorded on the balance sheets of service companies; tangible assets such as buildings, cars, computers, furniture’

Discuss the above statement, and what the implications of the claims made are.

5. Discuss the recent Quest inquest and Stevens inquiry with relevance to accounting in football.