The six-stage assignment workflow
Where a piece of assessed work lives from the moment you receive the brief to the moment before you submit — with Durmah as a tutor, not a writer.
Durmah is a tutor, not a writer. It can help you plan, test arguments, and explain doctrine — it will not write or rewrite your assessed work for you. Verify every case citation and statutory reference against your module materials and primary sources.
Starting
Add the brief — upload it as a PDF or DOCX, or paste the question text. Durmah reads it, identifies the command words, works out what the question is actually asking, and opens the workflow.
Without the actual question, the early stages are deliberately blocked. Guidance built on a guess about what your assignment asks is worse than no guidance — it is confidently wrong in a way that costs you marks. Add the brief and the whole workflow becomes specific to your task.
The six stages
| Stage | What happens | What you leave with |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Understand brief | Durmah interrogates the question with you. It will not move on until you have named the sub-issues and identified the hardest one. | A clear map of what the question asks |
| 2 · Research | Guidance towards the leading case, the statute and the textbook — then the refinements, the opposing authority and the commentary. Durmah tells you where to look; it does not do the reading for you. | A source list you built |
| 3 · Outline | Structure check: an introduction; for each sub-issue Issue, Rule, Application, opposing case, rebuttal and sub-conclusion; then a conclusion. | A structure that holds |
| 4 · Draft review | Paste your own draft. Durmah runs a reasoning-move checklist over each paragraph and returns the gaps as questions. | A specific list of what to fix |
| 5 · Formatting | A doctrinal pre-flight before citation work, then OSCOLA help. | Correct citations |
| 6 · Final check | Word count, OSCOLA, house style, plagiarism check, AI declaration, deadline — then, optionally, a full Mark My Paper diagnostic. | A final pre-submission checklist |
Progress saves automatically and you can return to any stage. You can run the workflow at a normal or an express pace — that changes the pacing, not the rigour.
The most common cause of a disappointing mark is answering a question adjacent to the one that was asked. Stage one exists to stop that, and it is the stage students are most tempted to rush.
Keep going
Source Pack and Argument Map
Two structured tools that sit alongside the workflow — a proper record of what you are relying on, and your reasoning as a structure you can see.
Mark My Paper: diagnostic review of your own draft
Give it your draft and it returns structured feedback — what is working, what is weak, what to fix first, and how to spend your next two hours.
Academic integrity: the boundary, stated plainly
Read this once in full. It is the part of the manual that protects you.
Still stuck?
Ask Durmah — it knows this manual and can point you to the right section. If the manual itself is wrong, out of date or unclear, tell us and we will fix it. Documentation errors are treated as product bugs.
Durmah is an independent study platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any university. Everything in this manual describes study support for legal education. It is not legal advice. Where this manual and your module handbook disagree, your module handbook is authoritative.