Intellectual Property Specialist Student Handbook 2026/27
13. Critical Thinking and Writing
13.2. Course Content
CTWL for All PG Law Students
As stated, CTWL is mandatory for students arriving with a condition. However, the Programme is open to all PG Law students irrespective of their entry status. This extends to native English speakers who have been regular attenders of this Programme over the years.
Semester 1 - EAL4791 CTWL: Literacy Development
Skills for locating suitable and authoritative source material are provided early in the module. Similarly, reading is a central focus of the first half of this ten-week module as students will need to read extensively around their module topics. The module develops knowledge and awareness of the layout, organisation and sequence of a variety of legal texts. The importance of reading expansively while selecting potentially useful material for their respective needs with greater efficiency, speed and confidence, is also addressed. The second part of the module is concerned with the requirements of exam writing and the preparation of a research proposal for the 10,000-word dissertation. Both Teaching Periods provide students with an opportunity to write and receive feedback on their work as well as weekly online tasks to test the language skills covered in the respective week’s teaching.
Semester 1 - Dissertation Proposal Writing
As PG Law students are required to write and submit their dissertation proposals by the end of November. A supplementary session is available for all students a few weeks before submission to help fulfil this requirement. The session addresses the components, approach and style of what is conventionally required for the QM proposal. Exact times and dates will be available in the CTWL section of the QMplus Dissertation Support Noticeboard.
Semester 2 EAL4792 CTWL: Dissertation Writing
Even though Semester 2’s CTWL provision is known as “dissertation writing”, the classes are available to all students irrespective of whether they are writing a dissertation. Indeed, many students attend both Semesters of CTWL as both focus on all the language areas needed to write effectively (and English is not so straightforward to write accurately, naturally and succinctly at higher academic levels). A number of PG law students elect to write a dissertation as well as submit coursework essays. Writing papers of this length accurately, while adhering to the formality and style required by Queen Mary, is a challenging undertaking for both foreign and English-speaking students alike.
Accordingly, this ten-week module addresses some of the areas of dissertation writing that have regularly been a source of student difficulty in previous years. Students are provided with the opportunity to work through the process of planning and structuring their dissertations and coursework essays and apply academic writing skills for law that were developed in Teaching Period One. For Dissertation writing classes (as with Semester 1 in the autumn), students attend one, 2-hour class, per week for 10 weeks between February and April.