I have created a TMA (tutor-marked assignment) template you can download for free and use for your own TMAs. It should be useful for Open University social science students. It may also be useful for other subjects and universities, but you should check with your own tutor or lecturer how they expect you to layout your assignments.

Using this template isn’t plagiarism because there is no content here; no answers to essay questions or text that would be marked. You’ll replace all the text in it with your name, module number, essay question, essay, and so on. It’s just to remove some of the guesswork about how to layout your assignment.

If you have already submitted assignments with different layouts than this, they’re not necessarily wrong and it doesn’t mean you’ve lost marks. Certainly the nitty gritty details don’t matter e.g. whether to bold or centre justify the essay title, whether or not to put the word count in brackets, etc. The most important points are to make it clear what question you are answering, where your answer begins and ends, dividing essays into paragraphs properly, and including a References section where appropriate.

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