By Charlie Abbott
There isn't one easy way of writing essays, unfortunately. It’s something you have to practise and keep trying at until you figure out a system that works for you, and usually by the time you’ve done that you’re about to graduate. However, I find some of these useful, and if you read some of these now, hopefully they’ll be helpful to you too. Of course, not all of them will be useful to you, but you can try them out and judge for yourself.
1. Mind-maps. I usually pick an overall theme or approach before I get started, and then I will spend twenty minutes or so mind-mapping my ideas. One of my professors taught me to do this; if you write down every idea you have, even if it’s absurd, then once you’ve done it you can go make a cup of tea, or maybe a muffin. Anything you like to give yourself a fresh set of eyes. Then when you come back, look at mind-map sometimes do a second mind-map with these new points. I then use this to create a very basic three-point map of the essay.
2. Go to your lecturer’s office hours. It’s what they are for! You can ask them for advice on your plan, even if you’ve just begun it, and they will often recommend secondary reading, which will often help you get started. Some undergraduates are too nervous to go to office hours until very late in their degree, and it’s a massive waste: your professors are here because they have the same passion for your subject that you do. Talking to them is always valuable.
3. Organise your secondary reading. I used to have one big document with all my secondary quotes in, but I saw a friend keeping them all in a table and I started doing this too; now I can have all my quotes for one text in one box, the references in another separate column, and any notes in a final column. Be sure to at least note two down where you are accessing the source from next to the quote, too; a link to the website or a book title and a page number will be very useful when you come back later to do your referencing. Referencing is already difficult enough: no need to make it even more difficult.
4. Set out clear and achievable goals. I usually need around 15 - 20 secondary sources for a 4000 word essay (I should specify this is for research - I don’t quote all of them), but I use a lot of theory. However, this doesn’t work for everyone, and I know some folks who use ten sources and find that easier. Work out how much you use and plan accordingly.
5. Plan your time. Again, to write a good 4000 word essay without rushing, I know I need 2 weeks so I plan ahead at the beginning of each term. I then plan out how much I want to get done each day. I’m a bit of a planning fiend though, so you might not want or need to do that. However, I’ve found that knowing how much you want to get done in a certain timeframe really can help you know when to keep going and when to take a break.
6. Once you’ve collected all your quotes, fill out your plan. I just slot them in vaguely where I think they’ll go, and then keep rearranging everything and adding bullet points of explanation and argument until it looks right. Somebody once told me that, if you plan in detail, your plan should be half the wordcount of the essay, but I’ve found that personally mine are usually two-thirds to three-quarters of the word count. This is, unfortunately, something you’ll have to figure out personally. For me, I plan in so much detail that my plan often takes as long to write as the essay itself. The more plans you write, the better you’ll get at judging how long they are going to take and how long they have to be.
7. Redraft. I usually print off my essay and annotate it with coloured biro pens, and I highly recommend that you try this if you haven’t already. Not only is it useful, but it’s quite fun getting to scribble over your essays in colourful pens. I go through each paragraph, write down what that paragraph is supposed to be achieving, and then see if it’s actually doing that. If it isn't, I go back through and cross out, re-write, and scribble all over it. It’s very satisfying, I promise.
8. Get your friends to give you feedback. Often, if they are on the course with you, they’ll have a deadline too, sometimes even the same one. You can ask if they want to swap with you, and then you can give each other feedback. They will spot mistakes
you don’t, and they will be able to tell you where your argument doesn’t make sense or veers off of its point. It always helps to tell the person what kind of feedback you want, too: if it’s the day before the deadline, you probably don’t want in-depth structural changes. In that case it’s more useful to get simple sentence changes and occasional argument tweaks. Make sure to ask others what kind of feedback they are after if they haven’t told you.
9. Do your footnotes and bibliography. Every lecturer I’ve met has told me to do them as I go. I literally never have. I make a quick note of where the source is so that I can find it later, put that in my secondary sources document, and then don’t look at it again until I’m done. Same with the footnotes: I just write the title and the page number there and come back later. You are probably not supposed to do this. But I
find that stopping midway through my essay to do MHRA formatting makes me lose focus. Just try and leave enough time at the end to do all your references and you’ll be fine. I find this process usually takes (at minimum) an hour for three-to-four-thousand words’ worth of footnotes.
10. Read the feedback your lecturer gives you. I always go through the feedback once I’ve gotten my grade to see where I could have improved. If I don’t understand the feedback, I try to go to the lecturer’s office hours and ask them. Often they’ll offer you better and more detailed advice in person.
Ultimately, it all comes down to practice, really. I know that’s not helpful or what you want to hear, but it’s true. Nothing is better for improving than just writing essays. The ‘good’ news is that most degrees set you a lot of essays, so you’ll have lots of opportunities.