Essay Writing
What should I do when I receive an essay title?
How can I plan my essay?
It is very important to plan your essay. So after you have decoded the question and you know what you have to do, then you know where you've got to start researching. Your researching will take the form of reading. So you will read lots of text and you will take references on those texts, because you must keep the references because you will need to put in your essay later. And once you have done all the readings, and you have got all of your notes, the important thing to do then is to start grouping the subjects within your essay, or subsections, or subheadings so that you've got smaller chunks of information. And a good way to do this is to draw some kind of mind map of all of the subsections and then put all of the ideas within each of the subsections, and then you can start building that up. So here you've got all of your subsections, you start building them up with ideas and things you have read, and then finally you have to have a beginning of your essay and you had to have an end of your essay. So that then constitutes your plan and you then start writing in any place, wherever you feel comfortable, you start writing. As a tutor, I have seen many essay where students have obviously not planed, and it just so obvious because it almost becomes a stream of consciousness and you can see a point in the essay where they have just thought of something and they start writing about it and you need to plan. You need to keep your plan, you can alter your plan, but it has to be a coherent plan and you have to tell a story, and not have some sort of rumbling mess that is just falling out of your head that you think about it.
What should I do once I've done my essay plan?
Once you've done your essay plan, you've got something to work from. This may not be the end product, but it's where you start. Your essay will eventually have a beginning and an end. That doesn't mean that you have to start at the beginning. It's very difficult to have an empty sheet of paper and find that opening sentence. Start anywhere that you feel comfortable with, but when you have a plan you can do this, because you know how all the pieces are linked together. You start writing where you feel comfortable, and when you get towards the end you can start putting in your first part, your introduction. Once you've done that, the last thing you do is the concluding paragraph. That will be your first draft.
How can I gather information for the essay?
You gather information for your essay essentially by reading. When you read, you need to find the key texts in support of your essay. You need to then write the full reference out. If you don't do that then you can't use that information later. You have to have a reference list, and you take notes.
How do I write a first draft?
When you are writing an essay, you will have many drafts. The first draft is always the most difficult. In order to write your first draft, you have to have a plan. When you have a plan, this shows you all of the subtopics within your essay. It shows you how those subtopics go together and flow. Those subtopics need to tell your story and display your arguments. They've got to be coherent. You start writing at any point in your plan. When you've written all of those subsections within your plan, you then have your first draft. At that point, you need to go back and edit and proofread and check your essay. You can't hand it in at this stage, this is only the first draft.
How important is writing style?
Writing style is very important. Very often, I see student essays, and they use words like "gorgeous", "massive", "great", and "wonderful". These sorts of words are very emotive and very subjective, and you often find them in newspapers, so it's like a journalist writing. However, when you write an academic essay, it needs to be objective. We can't have your opinion being filtered all the way through it, and we need to have evidence of your view. You're looking at what other researchers have done, and you're supporting that in your essay. Cut out words like "gorgeous" and "great" because they are too emotive.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is taking an idea from somebody else. That could be a concept, a piece of music, a diagram, some facts, or anything that they have done some research on and taking that as your own work. Now, you may not mean to do this but if you do put some facts or some opinions down in your essay and you don't accredit where it's come from that could constitute plagiarism. It's important to check with your institution the rules they have on plagiarism because if they find you have plagiarized work, then they could invoke penalties, and you may have to lose marks for your essay. If you actually know you are plagiarizing by copying and pasting big parts from the website, then the penalty would be really great!
How should I review the first draft?
When you write an essay, you will have the first draft and that is only the first draft. You will have to review it. The best way to review an essay is to think of it in terms of macro and micro levels. So, at the macro level we'll be looking at; have I answered the question, and is it the right topic? You will also ask yourself; is the structure of the essay the best for that question? And the third question you will ask at the macro level would be, is my argument coherent? Am I telling a story that is coherent? So, you need to go through your essay at this macro level and find out whether you have answered the question, is the structure right, and is the essay coherent. The next level is the micro level. Here, you will go through and looking for any spelling mistakes, you're looking at your grammar and you're also going to look at; do I have any long sentences that go over several lines. I must admit I've read many essays in my time as a lecturer, and that is one of the biggest problems. Long-winded sentences that go on forever, which also have lots of ands and which and buts, all in the middle and no full stop. So, please check the length of your sentences and also check that the sentence you have is actually complete.
What should I remember about the layout of my essay?
You may wonder how to layout your essay. That will depend on your tutor, you really have to go to the tutor, ask them how they'd like their essay laid out. But roughly speaking, if it's going to be a long essay, you may want to put in a contents page because it just helps to show the structure of your essay. If it's a shorter one, then you probably won't need that. But all essays will need to have a title, they'll need your name as a student. I must admit, I've had so many essays where the student doesn't put their name on it for some reason, and the pages should be numbered.
How can I make sure I don't lose my work if my computer crashes?
There are many reasons for handing your course work in late. One of them is that my computer has crashed. Unfortunately that is not a valid excuse any more. There are various ways of backing up your work while you are working on the computer. You can put it on a CD, a memory stick or if you have an older PC, you still have a floppy disk. So you must remember while you're working to always backup your copy and that is part of your responsibility as a learner to back it up. Another way of backing it up is to send parts of your essay to yourself by e-mail. It will then be in the University system and they have backups so you have always got it. So your computer crashing should only effect you for the last 10 minutes of your work. As you back up every 10 minutes, so please do not try and use it as an excuse.
What will happen if I don't hand in my essay on time?
If you don't hand your essay in on time, there will probably be some penalties. What those penalties are will depend on your institution, on the course you're taking, and possibly the lecturer. It's very important to find out what the penalties are if you don't hand your work in on time. If, for some reason, something important has happened to you, which means you can't do your work on time, most universities have what they call 'special considerations'. These penalties will be waivered, but you need to find this out.
How can I use feedback effectively?
Your tutors will give you feedback on the work that you do. Usually there's a timeframe within which they should provide feedback to you. When you get your feedback, it's important to look at it in terms of how you can improve the next piece of work. You may say the feedback only applies to this piece of work and not the next piece of work. The important thing for you is to look at whether there anything you can take from this feedback that's generic enough that can be used in another piece of work. So, for example, is your writing bad? Do you tend to have sloppy results? Do you make arithmetic errors across many of your pieces of coursework? You need to look and see if there's some pattern in the feedback for you. If you're not getting the feedback you want, it might be a good idea to ask your tutor for the particular feedback that you want.