Essay-Writing-Guide

Academic writing is not the same as a conversation or of you simply putting your point of view. The idea is to leverage the years of work that some of the brightest people on the planet have put into thinking about problems to help you in the pursuit of answering a question. This answer should be impersonal, formal and analytical rather than personal, informal and descriptive. To do this type of writing you need to spend a large amount of time and effort time digesting and thinking about the question you are answering and finding and understanding the academic literature on your subject. You will need to put into context and test the ideas and theories you find in academic literature in the pursuit of the answer to the question you have been set. ...

A) Choosing your question In most cases before starting an essay you must choose which question you want to answer. There is a balancing act to be done when making this choice. On the one hand you must be as thorough as possible when making your choice because choosing the wrong question can make a big difference in how difficult your task is, how enjoyable the essay is and the mark you will get. On the other hand you have to choose as quickly as possible because you need as much time as possible to think about the question, to do research and finally to answer the question. It is possible to switch questions after you have chosen one, but it requires a lot of extra work to get back on track. ...

There are 5 writing exercises presented here. Try some or all of these (to taste). Do some research and thinking about the essay. Work on them again Writing exercise 1: re-write the question in your own words The idea is to draw out what you think the question is getting at based on the ideas you have. Take each part and unpack it to explain what it means to you. ...

So far you have written down what you can think of. This may be a good start but it is almost certain that you need a lot more material and a lot more ideas. The research lets you use the work of people who are experts in the subject you are studying – without their insights your essay will be very poor at best. The research needs certain elements: arguments, facts, experts, arguments. Research will provide some of these directly and give you inspiration for the rest. ...

There is not a formula for structuring an essay. It depends on your style, the material you are using and even how you try to fit your argument into the word count. However below is a rough guide to one approach – take it as approximate rather than definitive. You might want to also look at the section on “Getting started: writing exercises” for alternative approaches to those presented here. ...

As a rule you will not write your essay and then present it. Instead you will produce several drafts that you read through, correct, alter and edit. Personally I go through about ten drafts over the course of several days or even weeks before the final version. This means I will have read the piece ten times at the very least and spotted a lot of flaws and problems along the way. ...