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Introduction
“My kingdom for a horse!” screamed Shakespearian Richard III in utmost despair. “My kingdom for a good essay!” cry students around the world, staring in horror at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank page. Sound familiar?
Writing skills are arguably considered essential for all prospective students, among humanities and science majors alike. But in reality, a better part of freshmen sitting in their first lecture hardly know how to put a couple of good sentences together let alone a whole paper. If you’re also feeling lost and don’t know where to begin, this article is a great place to start.
Writing is not easy
We can all agree with one thing — academic writing is not a piece of cake. While American and British education place some emphasis on acquiring basic knowledge of essay writing, the rest of the world must get by with what little practice and feedback they get. Even those scoring high marks for essays in high school find themselves puzzled at how to approach the university assignments, critically choose literature, and organize a coherent argument.
Time management is another big issue — raise a hand if you’ve ever waited until the last night to deliver an essay?
What about those who never thought they would have to write pages upon pages of texts? Science majors we’re looking at you!
The good news is, like most other skills, good writing skills can be learned, they require some background knowledge on the technicalities of writing, some advice on good prep and of course, lots of practice.
We’re here to make it easier — if you want to turn your writing experience from a nightmare to an adventure, keep reading.
What is an essay anyway?
A typically written assignment students will do in their academic life is a short (usually between 3 to 15 pages) text presenting an argumentation towards a certain point. Usually, undergrad level essays should be linear — which means the arguments follow one another in a logical fashion and are summed up in a concluding paragraph. A typical essay is organized into three to four main parts:
- Introduction: What’s it all about, present your initial arguments.
- Argumentation and analysis: Making your point(s) and backing it up.
- Counter argumentation: Presenting arguments against your point(s) (optional).
- Discussion and conclusion: Reiterate your main point(s) and show you’ve argued what you said you would.
Each of those parts has a certain function. For example, the introduction should present your subject, sources, and method of analysis. While the introduction and conclusion have their fixed places in the essay, other parts do not and they can be freely moved around to fit your train of thought.
What to consider before starting
Before you even start gathering your arguments you must consider a few things. First, remember that academic essays use a scholarly type of language, which has its own style and structure. While some disciplines allow more of a personal character to peek through your writing style, others are quite strict using standardized phrases, abbreviations, and tone of voice. Always check or ask about the language requirements before you start writing your first essay. A good tip is to find a scientific/academic writing phrasebook dedicated to your discipline. They are widely available online and will help massively before you become fluent in the jargon.
Always consider what type of essay you are supposed to write. There are many various types of essays — besides the most basic analytical one we mentioned above, there are comparative essays, narrative, descriptive, literature reviews amongst many others. It’s important that you clarify, what kind of essay you’re supposed to write as each will require a different approach.
Finally, it’s good to set up a personal goal for each essay you are about to write. Is it to get a passable grade? Great. Is it to impress your professor? Fine. Is it to indulge in the topic you’re passionate about and deliver a meticulous analysis? Amazing. Find out what you want, write it down and stick to it, as it will help you navigate through the process.
Where to start
Whether you’re given a prompt or a topic, or you have to choose it yourself remember that every essay, paper, and dissertation starts with a research question. It’s the main question you would like to find an answer to in your analysis. A good research question will lay foundations for your entire line of argumentation. Be precise — if the question is too broad you will find yourself drowning in the literature and end up without any coherent conclusions. If the question is too narrow you will not gather enough material to prove your point and will run in circles. To outline a research question, you need to focus on what you want to find out — yes, sometimes it means formulating a question to an answer you have. For example, let’s say you need to write an essay on Viking burials (cool topic, some of us are lucky). Your research question could be: was there a difference between the burial traditions of female and male Viking warriors?
Literature search
Once you have your research question, start browsing the literature. An obvious place to begin is your course syllabus, which is a list of compulsory reading, or lecture slides. Every good lecturer adds sources to lists, figures, definitions, and quotes — start looking through them. Go to the notes and bibliography section under the article and you will find lots of great sources. Later you can move to online search engines and databases. A literature review is one of the most important parts of essay prep and an art on its own — a critical review of your sources will affect the quality of your paper. Is it reliable data? What methodology has been used in this research? Is this an important journal? How do I know who’s an authority in this field?
Keenious to the rescue!
While searching through thousands of result pages on Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic can be daunting (especially when you’re not experienced), using smart student-friendly tech can make it a bit less overwhelming. Keenious is a add-on for Microsoft Word and Google Docs, its search engine analyzes your entire document and finds the top relevant literature for your essay. It’s that simple.
Using Keenious is like having a knowledgeable librarian by your side as you write. With Keenious you’re no longer uncertain about what papers to read and where to get started. When reading papers remember to take notes, everything that sounds interesting or relevant now might come in handy later. A good practice is to organize all your excerpts in one document, together with the location of the citation. With Keenious you can bookmark all your favorite papers together and return to them later when you need them. To make things even better, our smart library organizes all your bookmarks based on the document you are currently working on, letting you just focus on the task at hand!
Brainstorming and organization of arguments
When you have your research question and literature — brainstorm. Whether alone or with your colleagues, you can use sticky notes, plain paper, or colourful pens. Figure out what is interesting for you, and what line of argumentation comes up from your notes and literature review. It doesn’t need to be coherent… yet. Organize your arguments and try to select the most relevant ones. Once you have that done, create a final structure of your essay. You can use bullet points, drawings, or mind maps. The latter is a particularly popular method for essay prep and proves extremely helpful in depicting all the connections between the arguments. You can find tutorials on how to draw mind maps on YouTube. Now is also a good moment to jot down all the random interesting arguments or single sentences you come up with in one document — you can be sure they will prove useful later!
Types of reasoning
Once you have that done, a good tip is to decide what type of reasoning you want to apply in your essay. There are two: the inductive method begins with the arguments which logically build a coherent hypothesis and later — a theory. Deductive reasoning begins with a theory which your line of argumentation must prove or contradict. Each is good decide for yourself which one suits best for your arguments.
Writing made easy
And voila, you are prepared to write your essay. In the meantime, you have probably conceptualized half of it in your head — now it’s time to sit and write it all down. I know you are probably asking yourself, “but that’s a lot of work for just one essay…”. You’re right, it is. Writing is the last and probably the least demanding stage of producing an essay. The magic lies in a good prep, as this is when you learn to read papers, acquire the academic jargon, think critically, and create arguments. Writing it down is the home stretch.
On a positive note, the more you write the better you get. Once you’ve mastered the first few conceptual steps, literature review (especially with the help of Keenious), making notes and forming an argument will most likely merge, saving you a lot of time. Writing skills are a great asset. Being able to find reliable information quickly and efficiently, to ground your argumentation and structure a coherent text can prove invaluable in your professional life.
Think of writing your essays as a practice before a competition, you need to learn how to throw a ball before you score, right? Remember, you don’t have to be born a writer to write well. Like with every skill, 20 percent depends on the talent, 80 percent on practice. So write that first word.
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