You are both prime examples of why teachers are retards!
Basically this is the deal.
There is nothing saying that extended responses for economics must be either an 'essay' or a 'report' as you both mentioned. Further to this, an essay can have headings and indeed subheadings.
The reason teachers are retards: because they feed that bullshit to you like it is straight from the word of god. They too often oversimplify these things. The essay form that you are both referring to, i.e. the one without headings, is probably the worst method to do a piece of writing on economics. I can't remember ever reading the World Bank's 'essay without headings' on economic development can you?
In actual fact you are both kind of on the right track in terms of actually distinguishing between the two, and thinking about what the teacher might prefer. This is true. Some teachers will say 'hey you put headings in!' and think that for some reason that it weakens your response. This of course is absurd which supports my thesis that teachers are retards.
This is precisely why my advice was to check in with the idiosyncrasies of the marker before doing so. Should Chrisman happen to have a sensible teacher, they will encourage him to use headings as headings:
- help the writer to focus their mind on what kind of structure they want to apply to their response; and
- help very much help the reader, and in this case the marker, to follow the essay / report / whatever you want to call it.
I have marked more extended responses than you have both ever written and I can tell you that the best students can be identified by the structure applied, and most students benefit greatly by applying headings. The actual fact is that teachers are not quite as retarded when they are marking them in the HSC marking centre - must be something to do with the reasonable head markers - and so I would encourage all students to use headings and subheadings in their extended responses for the HSC.
By the way I mean no offence to retards.
