Online College Essay Writing

There are many familiar problems that emerge in your writing: irrelevance, weak structure, insufficient evidence and examples to support your arguments, lack of fluency between paragraphs, inconsistent arguments, and many others. This section offers you a practical guide through the five distinct stages of essay writing:

• Interpretation of the question
• Research
• Planning
• Writing
• Revision

If you omit any of these or just rush them, certain familiar problems will emerge in your writing.

It's also as important to separate each stage, leaving time between each of them. Not only does this allow you to return to your ideas fresh, so that you're able to see which of them needs to be edited out, but you will also find that your ideas and arguments have developed in the meantime.

Even more, it gives you the opportunity to get your own ideas and insights involved at an early stage. Without this your work can seem routine and predictable: at best just the re-cycling of ideas that dominate the subject. So, what should you be looking for when you interpret a question? All essay questions tell you two things:

1. Structure

By interpreting the question thoughtfully you will be able to unravel the structure your essay should adopt for you to deal relevantly with all the issues it raises.

2. The range of abilities

It will also reveal the range of abilities the examiner is expecting to see you use in answering the question. Otherwise you may find yourself writing an essay that is largely descriptive of the topic, when the examiner is asking you to analyse and discuss it critically.

Essay writing: research

Research is the foundation of any essay – if you have nothing to say, how can you write an essay?! Research is a process though, with many components. Brainstorming is a great way to kick off this process. However, your reading skills are just as important to how well you research, as are your note-taking skills and an effective retrieval system .

Brainstorming

This is time very well spent as part of your research strategy. It is not a time consuming task, yet it will help you to use more of your own ideas and avoid wasting time in your research. Once you've learnt to do this, you will be able to make two important things clear to yourself before you start your research:

1. What you know about the issues the essay question raises.
2. The questions you want your sources to answer.

If you begin your research without doing this, certain things are likely to happen:

• The authors you read will dictate to you: without your own ideas to protect you, it will be difficult, at times impossible, for you to resist the pull of their ideas and the persuasiveness of their arguments.
• As a result you'll find yourself accepting the case they develop and the judgements they make without evaluating them sufficiently, even copying large sections of the text into your own notes.
• You will find it difficult to avoid including a great mass of material in your essay that is quite irrelevant to your purposes. All of this material may have been relevant to the author's purposes when he or she wrote the book, but their purposes are rarely identical with yours.
• Nevertheless, having spent days amassing this large quantity of notes, it's difficult to find the detachment to decide that most of these notes are irrelevant to your essay and you've got to ditch them. All of us are more likely to try to convince ourselves that they can "be made" relevant, and we end up including them in a long, discursive, shapeless essay, in which the examiner frequently feels lost in a mass of irrelevant material.
• Because you haven't revealed what you know and think about the subject, it will be much more difficult for you to process the ideas you read, make them your own, and then use them convincingly.

Reading skills

Most of us spend hours reading texts that we need not have read. To avoid this you must read purposefully: you need to be clear why you're reading a particular text, what questions you need to answer, and what reading strategy is the most relevant for this purpose.

Many of us get into the habit of reading every passage word-for-word, regardless of our purpose in reading it, when in fact it might be more efficient to skim or scan it. Adopting a more flexible approach to our reading in this way frees up more of our time, so that we can read around our subject and take onboard more ideas and information. It also gives us more time to process the ideas not only into clearer structures that we can remember more clearly, but also in ways that allow us to criticise and evaluate what we read, rather than just accept what the author tells us.

Making notes

The key to good note-taking is to make the structure clear. The mind remembers structures, not lists nor paragraphs of continuous prose. So, keep it free and uncluttered. Don't convince yourself that unless you include this one fact you'll never remember it. You will. The structure will act as a net bringing to the surface of your mind more than you ever thought you could remember. But it has to be a good net - well constructed, with clear logical connections and free of all unnecessary material.

Remind yourself that you do have a good memory if you help it with clear structures. Try not to be seduced into recording things that "might" be useful in the future. Inevitably, this results in masses of notes that obscure the main structure, which is the only means by which we can recall them in the first place.

For more advice, see making notes.

An effective retrieval system

If we are to generate and use more of our own ideas and insights, we will have to spend some time organising an effective research strategy. The key to this is to have a retrieval system that is sufficiently adaptable to catch the material whenever and wherever it shows itself, and then provide us with a means of accessing it easily whenever we want it.

To create such a system isn't difficult, but it means going beyond the normal loose-leaf folder, a few wallet files and a reliable source of A4 paper. It calls for a thoughtful approach, a little imagination and, above all, flexibility. Unless we choose and organise its various components thoughtfully, we're likely to lose most of our best ideas, and produce work that is predictable and imitative of the ideas we've been given.

To put it simply, our system should promote, not frustrate the quality of our work. This is not an unimportant part of our pattern of study, and its influence is never neutral. Get it right and we can find ourselves with an abundance of insightful ideas that are genuinely our own. Get it wrong and our work struggles to rise above the mundane and imitative.

So, think about carrying a notebook, keeping a journal, running an index card system, and using a project box.

Essay writing: planning

efore you even begin writing the first sentence of your essay, you need to plan your essay. Planning in an exam is vital too to enable you to produce a first-class essay.

Plan your essay

Planning your essay helps you in three important ways:

1. Structure

The plan gives your essay a clear structure for examiners to follow as they navigate their way through ideas and arguments that are unfamiliar to them. Without this you're likely to lose them, and if they can't see why your arguments are relevant, or they can't see what you're doing and why, they cannot give you marks, no matter how good your work might be.

2. Your arguments

It helps you ensure that all of your arguments are clearly and consistently argued, and that you have sufficient evidence to support them. It also reduces the risk of omitting some really important section or argument that is central to the issues raised by the essay.

3. Your writing

By rehearsing your arguments in detail you will avoid the problem of trying to do the two most difficult things in writing at the same time: pinning down your ideas clearly, and then summoning up the words and phrases that will convey them accurately.

Planning in an exam

Spend the first five to ten minutes writing down your plan before you begin to write the essay. Don't get panicked into writing too soon before you have exhausted all of your ideas and got them organised into a coherent, well structured plan, that answers the question with strict relevance.

Indeed, it makes very good sense to plan all the questions you have to do, before you pick up your pen to write the first one. Each time you plan an essay you ask your subconscious to answer questions and dig up material you can't recall. Except in the strongest of questions, there are always arguments, points, evidence and examples that you can't remember exactly. Nevertheless, by identifying the problem in the planning stage you will have alerted your subconscious and, while you're writing another question, it will be busy unearthing what you need.

Writing skills

You will find that your writing skills develop significantly whilst at university because there are usually writing assignments to complete for every module or unit or option. Your spelling and vocabulary will also improve. In this section, you can read more about the writing process and how to go about getting top marks in all your assignments.

• Enjoy the process
• Define the task
• Plan the assignment tasks
• Make an outline plan for your writing
• Stages in the writing process
• Grammar, spelling and punctuation

Enjoy the process

There is such a lot of writing to do at university that it is worth finding the point of enjoyment in writing as a process. This is easier if:

1. You give yourself enough time to write up your work so that you are not always rushing to meet deadlines.

2. You break writing tasks down into several stages with their own deadlines. This is easier than trying to write the perfect essay or report first time.

3. You regard writing as a craft. Write several drafts. Aim to make each successive draft better than the previous one.

4. Familiarise yourself with the style and conventions of your subject. Take pride in producing a piece of writing that is good by the standards of your own subject.

Define the task

Spend time working out exactly what is required by the assignment title. The title will usually include a question that you must answer.

Think through:

• Why was this particular title or assignment set?
• What are your tutors expecting that you will research?
• What issues do they intend you to cover?
• What theories, research and evidence do they expect you to refer to?
• What recent research or articles have been published on this subject?
• What methodologies are your tutors expecting you to use to demonstrate that you understand how to apply these?

Plan the assignment tasks

• Use the word limit and the assignment title to guide you in how much you need to read of each book and article recommended.
• Make a list of all the steps you need to take in order to finish the writing task. Work out how long each will take you. Each step will probably take longer than you think so plan for this.
• Write each task into your diary so you know when it will be done.

Make an outline plan for your writing

It takes time to rewrite each draft of your writing. The more you have to change, the longer it will take. This makes it worthwhile to develop a detailed outline of your writing. If you do this straight onto the computer, you can reorganise the plan on screen, and progressively build on this until you complete your final draft.

Stages in the writing process

These will vary but the following steps offer a basic outline:

• Work out what your conclusion is and write it down.
• Brainstorm initial ideas onto the computer.
• Organise these into headings with main points underneath.
• Organise these headings-and-points into the best order.
• Write in other headings that will structure your writing, depending on the nature of the assignment (such as introduction, conclusion, references, abstract, methodology, results, etc).
• Allocate a word limit for each point - check whether you have enough or too many points for the word limit you have allocated.
• Select the strongest points and save the rest elsewhere.
• Write up your points - you may find it easier to start with the conclusion.
• Read through and fine tune - check it makes sense, check one point seems to lead naturally to the next.

• Leave the writing for a day- read and fine tune again
• Print out and read aloud - look for typing errors and other mistakes: correct these

You will develop your own strategies and find short-cuts as the process becomes more familiar to you. For example, some people find that they develop their ideas as they write whereas other people cannot write until they have worked out what they need to say.

For more advice, see essay writing.

Grammar, spelling and punctuation

Universities usually assume that you can already cope with grammar, punctuation and spelling. If you need to improve these, see student support services early on as these take time to develop. It is well worth improving these technical writing skills alongside your degree as they will be taken into consideration by many employers.

Essay writing: revision

Revising for an essay might not be as straightforward as learning that 1+1=2, but there are many techniques out there to bring exam success. Read about revising for the exam in the following section, and then as you begin to revise, tick off your progress on the essay revision checklist.

Revising for the exam

Try revising for the exam by planning all the typical questions that are set on each of the topics you plan to write on in the exam. Once you've done this you will find these plans represent the core material for your revision. All you then need to do is commit them to memory and test yourself to see if you can recall them within ten minutes, as you will have to do in the exam.

As a consequence, revision will be far less daunting. In effect you know that if there are, say, six topics that will come up on the paper, and there are four typical questions on each topic, then you have just 24 essay plans to commit to memory and recall under timed conditions. Most of us can cope with this without any problem. Even if you don't get in the exam exactly the question you've revised, your structured plans will help you recall all the material you need.

Essay revision checklist

1. Have I interpreted the implications of the question thoroughly? Have I missed anything?

2. Does the introduction analyse the implications clearly and give the reader a clear indication of the structure of my answer?

3. Have I arranged the material logically?

4. Does the essay move fluently from one section to the next, from paragraph to paragraph?

5. Does each topic sentence introduce the subject of each paragraph clearly?

6. Have I developed each argument sufficiently?

7. Have I made my arguments clear, or are there difficult passages that would benefit from being rewritten?

8. Do I support each argument with sufficient evidence and examples?

9. Do all my examples and evidence really work?

10. Have I shown, rather than told, the reader wherever possible?

11. Have I answered this particular question relevantly?

12. Have I dealt with all the implications of the question that I identified in the interpretation stage?

13. Have I covered these in enough depth?

14. Have I spent too much time on less significant issues, while only dealing superficially with any of the major issues?

15. Have I presented a convincing case, which I could justify confidently in a discussion?

16. In the conclusion have I avoided introducing new ideas that haven't been dealt with in the body of the essay?

17. Have I tied my conclusion in with my introduction?

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