Guidelines for Writing Essays

Guidelines for Writing Essays

Assignments that are essays

As a student you can expect the next few years of your university education to be filed with assignments. Many of those assignments will be essays and there are good reasons for this. By writing essays you are intended to develop an understanding of the issues and resources in your courses as well as enabling you to practice research and writing skills that will be useful to you during your academic career and at work after you graduate.

In developing your understanding of your discipline, you will be exposed to a wide range of concepts, issues and methods of inquiry. The aim of an academic essay is not simply to show how many facts you know or how comprehensive your research is. This is not to suggest you won’t be expected to learn new facts, but just as important are your ability to appreciate how those facts fit together, and your skill in using them to discuss or argue issues from a variety of perspectives. Essay assignments are intended to help you develop several abilities that your instructors consider important. Many occupations will include some component of preparing papers or reports that are intended to convey information effectively to other people, and to convince them of some particular point of view. Skills you will develop writing essays include:

- Practice in scheduling work

- Use of specific writing styles and formats

- Evaluation of your work methods

- Understanding of material

Doing Research

Any essay begins with research to help you clarify the issues, positions and evidence related to your topic. In first-year courses, your research will be supported by your lectures and reading list, which provide an overview and supplementary material on the topic. Within the Contemporary Studies program you will encounter Information Literacy instruction where you will be introduced to ways of using the library and other academic material not specified by your instructor. This forms a knowledge base useful in later courses, where you will be expected to be more independent in defining questions and finding appropriate sources of information for answering them.

Making Notes

It may seem obvious, but you should always make notes to keep track of your research. People who are rushed sometimes don’t bother to make notes. In the long run, however, you don't save time if you quickly look over a book or article, then try to write an essay from memory. Eventually you will need to cite your work and far more time will be wasted trying to find the source. In subsequent years as your knowledge expands you may find these notes useful in providing background for other papers. The key is to keep useful notes and complete citations from works you have consulted.

Tips for making notes

Since we’re talking about notes, making notes should not consist of writing word-for-word what you hear or read. For notes to help you understand a subject and be useful, several elements are paramount:

- put things into your own words -- your notes will make more sense to you and will be easier to use for revising or writing

- select information relevant to your purpose –to help you to understand the material or add to your understanding of a topic

- abbreviate -- as long as you can still follow the logic

- structure -- to highlight main and secondary ideas/evidence and links between them

- organize for flexibility -- so that you can use your notes now but also in the longer term.

Mistakes to avoid

Your research and note taking should enable you to report accurately other people's ideas and research, and to distinguish them from your own commentary and evaluation of them. To assure this:

Don’t forget to write down the author and source for any notes that you take. Short-term memory is just that and very soon essential information will be forgotten.

Don't forget to use quote marks for sentences or phrases you use verbatim, and don’t forget the page number.

Don't write down huge long passages that you don't understand. They won’t be any more intelligible later and therefore do not belong in your paper.

Plagiarism is not acceptable. This should say it all, but if it isn’t, have a look at the university’s policy on academic dishonesty in the calendar or on the university’s web site. Laurier has taken steps to help students and faculty in their quest for academic integrity. The university has purchased a site license for Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection software. As a result you should be prepared to submit your assignments electronically if requested to do so by your professor. Don’t be fooled into thinking you are safe from detection if you do not submit electronically, your professors have a number of options available for using Turnitin.com.

Don't rely solely on a single source just because an author agrees with your position. Part of the critical thinking aspects of essay work is for you to evaluate the positions of multiple authors writing on your topic. You should be able to find more than one author who agrees with you and you must be aware of authors who present an alternative point of view.

Planning to write

Unless you truly are a multitasking whiz you will need to follow up your research and note taking by making a plan before you begin to write an essay. It is a false economy to spend little or no time on the plan, thinking that you will sort everything out during the process of writing. You are more likely to get stalled or loose track of your line of argument. Time spent on effective planning will greatly cut down writing time.

Answer the question

To understand what a good plan looks like, you need to be clear on what it should enable you to do. Certainly that is to write the essay, but what are you trying to do in that? Whatever your topic answer the research question. Sure this is obvious, but a common problem with early essays is the failure to address and/or to answer the research question. No matter how well you write it is difficult to get a good mark without this key element.

The essay assignment asks you to do something and establishes the context for your answer. Words like `compare and contrast’, `discuss’, `why' or `how' etc. usually appear in the description of the assignment. Some resources are relevant to your assignment, even more are not. Analyzing what the question means, and what material is relevant to answering it, is an important part of planning your essay. No essay is ever intended for you to `write everything you know about the topic'.

Make a plan

An essay plan should provide a framework of the answers to your research question. A single page should be fine for planning an essay, and allows you to see how the whole essay fits together. Your essay plan should include these components:

- A summary of the introductory paragraph. This paragraph orients the reader to what you are trying to do and how you intend to do it. It tells the reader what to expect and sets the scope of your research.

- List the main points of your argument. Note the essence of each major point in your essay in a single sentence.

- Under each point make a brief reference to the evidence from supporting resources that will be included.

- The conclusion, which should sum up the essay following logically from your points.

Connecting the thoughts

Once you have an essay plan, writing the essay should be a simple task of producing the prose to flesh it out. This is easy enough once you have mastered it, but the fleshing out process requires practice to prevent your essay ending up as a list of points that seem unrelated.

You have to use appropriate phrases in appropriate places to make the structure of your argument clear and compelling to the reader. The best rule of thumb is that readers should never have to try to work out for themselves why you have included any particular material in your answer. You should tell them, and do so at a time when they can best take advantage of that information.

- Avoid repeating the same point or conclusion in a series of paragraphs

Don’t Loose Marks Over Looks

You have the content of your essay under control, all that remains is to get the details of the presentation right. Above all other advice, follow the directions given by your instructor. They may have preferences for margins, length, citation style etc.

Sections

Should you subdivide your essay into separate sections, each with its own heading? In a practical report this would be essential. In an essay it is optional, but it will sometimes be useful. This should never be done in short essays.

Acknowledge your sources

Making clear where the ideas and evidence you include in an essay come from is essential. There are standard academic ways of doing this. Most of your instructors in Contemporary Studies will expect you to cite according to Turabian. You must always acknowledge other people's writing and research in the text of your essay, citations, and at the end of your essay, full references for what you have cited.

Naming names

There are two main ways of acknowledging another’s work. Footnotes are sometimes used. The name, date, title and publication details of each source are numbered according to the order in which they are being cited, and given in full at the bottom of the page, with a corresponding number on the page where the work is mentioned.

For Contemporary Studies essays you should use the name, date method. The author’s name and the year of publication of the work are included in your text. This information should then repeated in a references list at the end of your essay, along with the full title and publication details of every piece of work that you have cited.

Only the author's surname should usually be included in the text. For example, where a single author and piece of work are involved:

- Two ways of testing this hypothesis have been suggested (Murphy and Warrick, 1991).

- Murphy and Warrick (1991) suggested two ways of testing this hypothesis.

Three or more authors of a single work -- can take up a lot of space in your essay as the list of names gets longer, without adding much information. It is usual to give all of the surnames the first time you mention the work, then shorten the citation to the surname of the first author and the abbreviation `et al.': First mention: Groarke, Haller, Feagan and Murphy (1981) argued that...Subsequent mentions: Groarke et al. (1981) argued that...

Secondary citations are those where you wish to cite work that you have not read in the original but have read summarized and/or discussed in some other (secondary) work. In your essay, you should acknowledge the primary (unread) and secondary (read) sources of your material as follows:

- Haller (1980, cited in McKendry, 1988) failed to confirm this hypothesis.

At the end of your essay, you should put the full reference to the work you actually read in this case McKendry (1988), not the reference to the work you read about at second-hand, in this case Haller (1980). This absolves you of responsibility for any errors in the secondary source's coverage. But you may also be missing out, since originals are frequently more interesting and may include material not hinted at in the secondary source.

Personal communications, when someone provides you with details of an unpublished argument or research findings through correspondence or discussion, are generally acknowledged as follows:

A recent attempt to replicate Haller’s (1980) study has been only partly successful (Farrugia, pers. comm.).

Reproducing other's words

Sometimes you need to do more than cite the source of an idea or piece of work in your essay. To strengthening your argument may require that you reproduce word-for-word something you have read. Using phrases, sentences or whole sections of what you have read is quotation. You can include quotations when something striking is said that you will discuss but cannot summarize in your own words without loss of meaning. Always acknowledge quotations appropriately by including the page number(s) along with the author's name and year of the work.

Short quotations, up to about 40 words, should be marked with double quotation marks and are written in the text:

However, this position is contradicted by a subsequent argument that ``Sustainability fundamentally is a political concept'' (Feagan, 1993, p.35).

Long quotations, a paragraph or so, should be identified by indenting them from the margins. Provided this is done, quotation marks are not needed. For example:

There is some debate within ecofeminist thought over the direction to which social transformation in an ecologically sound framework should occur, and it is usually confined to a base dichotomy between the psycho-biologics tic (or essentialist) and the social constructivist theories. (Feagan, 1993, pp.59-60)

You should note that:

- Author(s)

- Full title

- Publication details

Whether you are giving a reference for an article, book, book chapter or paper/presentation, you always include the author of the work, the date of publication, both of which already appeared in your essay. Then use the following guidelines for each type of material:

Journal articles -- full title of the article, title of the journal in italics, the volume number, issue and numbers of the start-end pages of the article:

Banighen, J. (1990). Citizen Involvement in Forest Stewardship. The Trumpeter 7:2, 80-85.

Books -- full title of the book in italics (ending in a full stop and capitalized throughout), place of publication and publisher's name (separated by a colon):

Naess, A. (1986). Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapters in edited books -- full title of the chapter, initial(s) and surname(s) of editors in normal order, book title and publication details as above:

Ophuls, W. (1977). “The Politics of the Sustainable Society”. In D.C. Pirages (ed), The Sustainable Society: Implications for Growth. New York: Praeger.

Lectures, conference papers or seminar presentations when unpublished should be included in your reference list using the following general formats:

Person, A. (2002). Title of cited lecture. Lecture presented at Wilfrid Laurier University. Brantford, 12 September.

Person, A. (2000). Title of cited conference paper. Paper presented at the Annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies. Brantford, 12-15 September.

Ordering entries in your reference list should always follow the general principle of arranging them in alphabetical order and chronological sequence.

Don’t loose marks over looks

It is always in your best interest to provide your instructor with a clean, easily read document for evaluation.

Typing

I hope you will be surprised to learn that some students believe it is acceptable to submit work that is handwritten. If this does surprise you, let me clarify. It is extremely unusual for work to be accepted which is not typed or word-processed at any academic institution.

Here at Laurier Brantford there are computer and printing facilities for those who do not have their own. There are, of course, drawbacks to using public workstations. The obvious ones include:

- Lab open/closing hours

- Classes in the lab

Spelling

Do spelling, grammar and punctuation matter? Oh yes! If you spell everyday words wrong, at best the appearance of your work will be marred; at worst you will not be saying what you think you are, you may use a word with a totally different meaning. Grammar and punctuation exist to give you the ability to convey your precise meaning to the reader. For example, one comma can totally change the meaning of a sentence. If you want to be sure that your reader is reading what you are trying to say in the way you intend, you need to achieve a basic grasp of spelling, sentence structure and punctuation. Dr Farrugia has an excellent web page explaining some of the pitfalls of written work.

Some last thoughts

If planning and writing essays is not your favourite part of university you’re not alone. There may be new skills for you to learn, and nobody enjoys feeling they don't know what they're doing. In addition, the whole point of research and writing is to clarify and change the way you see things. Then finally, completing your essay means that someone else will evaluate it, and you may be apprehensive about that. Eventually you will come to appreciate that when your instructor evaluates your work it is to help you learn.

You may sometimes intend to produce an essay but find it hard to get going at all. It may help to think about this as a difficulty in setting the realistic goals that will help you to convert your intention into action. Finding time to `do that essay' is not a very well phrased goal: it is too large, too ill defined in terms of what you are telling yourself to do, and hence too vague to schedule effectively into the time you have available. Specific sub-tasks like reading and making notes on a background chapter, or preparing your plan or reference list, are more manageable. Since writing a paper should be broken down into many smaller tasks that require different amounts of time. This time doesn't have to be whole days or weekends set-aside for the sole purpose of essay writing. Time before or between classes or before you go home for the weekend can be useful too. Try scheduling time to get one (specific) thing towards your overall goal of handing in the essay on time.

Sometimes people get stuck at the reading stage of an essay. They can't start planning or writing until they've read `just the right article' or `just one more article'. Try to be realistic about how much you can read in the time available to you and appropriate for the assignment.

If your plan is proving especially hard, you may be a victim of too many notes. How can you fit all those notes into your plan? Try looking over your notes before you plan, then put them out of sight and taking a brief break of some kind. Do your draft plan from memory, only then going back to your notes to see if you have left out anything that is absolutely vital to the essay.

If you are writing but don't seem to be able to get finished, you may be in the grip of perfectionism: the (often-unconscious) belief that your completed work is worthless unless it achieves absolute perfection. This is an especially debilitating belief in the early stages of essay writing since you are expected to be learning, not to know everything already. Try thinking of essays as progress reports that provide a picture of what you think and understand now.