Writing

Consider these points step by step The more time you spend studying the more successful you will be. You need motivation for that study time to be productive. If you are not that interested in studying but see it as a necessary way to get to your ideal career or even if you just want to get a degree then this is called an “instrumental approach”. If you are being “instrumental” and you are not that interested in studying you will be poorly motivated and you will find it difficult to have quality time spent studying. If you are not motivated then academic study will seem like a burden, be more difficult and it is likely that you will become cynical and either fail or get a low degree. For success (and an easier life) you must have a motivation towards academic enquiry that is separate or independent from your career aspirations. You must learn to love (or at least like) what you are studying. You must get into the study itself. One key motivation is when study helps you understand something. However, getting started is often difficult. This means an open attitude to new ideas and different ways of seeing the world is important. The idea of academic study (for everyone from undergraduates to professors) is that we do not know enough but that through research, writing and reflection we can understand more and more. Academic study at its best is transformative: students will have a different relationship with the rest of the world. And, rather than reflecting fixed intelligence, the results of study point towards continually developing knowledge and understanding. However, there are absolutely no shortcuts to this process: it requires lots of hard work. Exercise: Write a paragraph explaining what you find interesting about your course. ...

These points are based on common feedback that students get on their essays. Some are more important than others. Some are quite technical. All of them contribute in one way or another to your mark. So it is worth going through all these points to avoid the same mistakes. When a marker gets a text that is easy to read without having to put in a lot of little comments, they will spend more time giving you substantial feedback and they will be predisposed towards giving you a higher mark. As a rule of thumb the less time something takes to be marked the higher the mark it gets! ...

Below is an example of a third year essay that got a first. Nonetheless it is not the best essay in the world. Do not think of it as a template but as an example of the approach you should be thinking about and some indication of what you are looking to achieve. Consider how something such as TV celebrity that might be discussed in a conversation is approached in the academic form of an essay. ...

If you were writing a report, or a newspaper or magazine article, or a book an important consideration would be who is the audience for this. Even before you started writing you would want to have in mind who would read it. If you were creating a sales pitch to get an editor to commission your piece, you would even have in mind what the editor saw their audience to be. While you wrote you would try to keep in mind what the level of knowledge and what are the interests of the people you are writing for. What do they know already? What do they need to know? Who are they? ...

An undergraduate education and a good degree can be the key to your future. And, in the humanities, the essay is the key to undergraduate education. Your performance is based on how you deal with answering a set of questions in writing i.e. the essay. This is an indication of how testing the essay can be. Make no mistake: this is a major step up from secondary education. However, should you persevere, you will find that all the talents that you put towards answering essay questions will have a transformative impact on how you understand the world and your chosen subject. ...