A1A2 Class, 2022 Period 6, Wednesdays / IAR 1222E

Graduate School of Public Policy Yuka Motoda (Gakushuin University)

yuka.motoda@gakushuin.ac.jp

Governance and Development

14 December, 2022
Instructions for Academic Essay Format and Contents

1. Academic Essay Topics:

① The students should feel free to select any topic for their academic essay as long
as they tackle issues relevant to both ‘governance’ and ‘development’.
② If the students are not sure if the topics they are interested in are relevant for
the essay, please ask the lecturer for advice.
③ ‘An academic essay’ here means a result of academic endeavours to present a
structured argument which aims to answer a specific research question.

Box 1: A Common Structure for An Academic Essay

Box 2: Common Structural Elements of ‘Policy Paper’
*This is not what the students are expected to produce.

Source: Young, Eóin and Lisa Quinn (2002) Writing Effective Public Policy Papers: A Guide for Policy Advisers in

Central and Eastern Europe, Budapest: Local Government and Public Service Reform

Initiative/Open Society Institute, p. 22.

2. Word Count:
① The length of the essay should be 3,500 words.
② The following will not be included in the word count of the main text: title page
(with name and title etc.), summary, table of contents, footnotes and references
(bibliography).

3. Submission Guidance:
The essays should be saved in a single file and uploaded to the section created in the
LMS-ICT by 23 : 55 on 4 February, 2023 the latest.

4. Paper/Layout
① All papers should be clearly written and word-processed using plain white A4
paper size with the margins set by the default document format of MS-Word (or
equivalent processing applications such as Ichitaro).
② Avoid the use of frilly font types that are hard to read – Century, Times Roman
or Arial are preferred.
③ Font size should be uniform through out and be in 10 – 12 pt. Larger fonts may
be used on the title page.
④ Text should generally be double spaced; however, single spacing may be used
for: figure and table entries and captions, and reference or data listings. Pages
should be numbered consecutively starting after the title page.

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5. General Contents: See also Box 1 above
① Title Page (indicating title [and subtitle if necessary], student name, course
affiliation, student ID number, course title, date of submission)
② An 150 word summary
③ Table of Contents
④ Introduction (providing background, paper purpose, research question,
analytical framework/approach and contents, etc.)
⑤ Body: Various Internal Sections (logically divided and ordered to present the
study)
* A literature review may usually be offered in an earlier part of the body to
address how you approach the research question. Even if this is the case,
a brief description of your analytical framework should be presented in
the introductory section.
⑥ Conclusions
⑦ List of References
⑧ Appendix (optional for additional material that is of minor importance; e.g.
data, extra figures and/or tables, etc.)

6. Referencing
① All sources of information used to develop the argument in the essay should
be properly referenced. The essay should contain a method of linking text
information to the sources from which it came.
② The participants should feel free to choose one of the established referencing
systems such as the Harvard Referencing System, the Oxford
(Footnote/Bibliography) Referencing System or the American Psychological
Association (APA) Referencing System as far as it is uniformly employed from
the beginning to the end.
③ Even though full bibliographic information is given in the footnote or endnote
references, it is necessary to provide a separate list of the works cited in the
main text in the section entitled ‘List of References’.