But there's this, which I've copied from the department website of a German university. Not the one for which I work, but representative:
Following the cover sheet, the second page of your paper must contain a table of contents,indicating the subdivision of the paper into smaller chapters. For each subchapter give the title and the page number on which it starts. Subchapters are enumerated. The introduction usually “1.”, the main body of text starting with „2.1“, followed by 2.2, perhaps „2.3“, etc.If you need even smaller subchapters, use “2.1.1”, “2.1.2”, “2.1.3” etc.
I have yet to find any university English Department or Anglophone Studies Department or Humanities Department in Germany that teaches the most basic, obvious, overlooked fact--now I have their attention--facts are big here in Germany: good writing comes from opinion. Not facts. If facts were all we wrote about, we wouldn't be writing. In fact, there isn't much writing in Germany schools and universities. There's the tradition of the Facharbeit, in which students research a subject and present the research neatly divided into subchapters. Opinion is a messy thing--I might not like yours. There might be unpleasantness. The student might say something the teacher finds repulsive. Or dumb. Or new. But isn't what the student says the student's business? Isn't the teacher's job to help students express those opinions clearly?
A very non-German question. What if the student says something racist? (They never do, around here at a German university). But what if they did? Or sexist? Or just wrong? (Wrong is something a teacher decides around here).
Well, in that situation I would sit with the student and ask where the thoughts came from? Could the student tell me?
The last thing German students are ever asked in any class is what they think. They are asked to "state your opinion," but even that is constricted to "pro or con" and the opinion may only be given after the student has summarized a passage, one usually drawn from a newspaper or a magazine, typically on a topic like cyberbullying. First you summarize, then you state your opinion, pro or con. There's no room for partial agreement, looking at the issue from a different angle, or redefining that issue entirely. Because what you think is never the issue.
I knew I teacher who, as her students were writing the paragraphs she made them write, and when one of them asked,"Should we put in our opinion?" said, "Nobody cares what you think."
She wasn't regarded as the wicked witch of the west. They rather liked her acid wit. "She's sassy," observed a colleague. She wasn't unusual, is the point.
Another colleague tells me--he says he's experienced, he's been doing this for years, he knows: "Some of them have no opinions." He can't get an opinion out of his students.
I say any creature leaning toward the light has an opinion. What did you eat for breakfast? Why oatmeal and not a bagel? Why do you like this online shop and not that one? Opinions will follow on these topics, the notion of having any opinion will, ever so gradually, be absorbed. I say the students who seem like they have no opinions sometimes have the most interesting ones--if they're finally willing to utter them.
I say there's this Anglo-American tradition, "the essay," which includes Hazlitt, Woolf, David Foster Wallace. Joan Didion. Continental writers. Montaigne.
But go to Wikipedia and look for famous essayists and all that great online encyclopedia can cough up are five Germans, including Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Seek, but ye shall not find. You might come across "Owlcation," which tells young German students what to write when they're asked to to an essay called "My Family." My family: let's start families of writers in German schools and universities. Let's start essay-writing. Oh, it's not that easy. Ask German students what they really think and they feel slightly shocked. That's a personal question. Yes. If they begin to answer, there's something that might just hatch into an essay.
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