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:
- Finding, evaluating and selecting information relevant to a topic
- Discovering relationships between concepts and evidence
- Organizing evidence to support your position
rather than simply gathering and repeating information you've found.
Transferable skills that
are enhanced by essay work 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.
- Ensure that all the steps of your
argument/discussion appear explicitly in the essay and are not left behind in
your plan or your head. Don't just
present the evidence for points that you wish to make, leaving it to speak for
itself.
- Make your commentary as you go along, don't
`save' it all for a final conclusions section.
- 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 (Feagan, 1990).
- Feagan (1990) suggested two ways of testing
this hypothesis.
If several works and/or
several authors need to be cited, you can do this in the following ways:
Several works by the
same author -- give the surname only once, followed by the years in which the
work appeared in chronological order, separated by commas:
- Several tests of this hypothesis were
undertaken (Feagan, 1978, 1980, 1986).
Several works by different
authors -- give the surnames in alphabetical order, with their year(s) of
publication, separated by semi-colons. If several works are being cited by one
or more of these authors, arrange the years of publication chronologically as
in the preceding example:
- Attempts to replicate these findings have so
far been unsuccessful (Feagan, 1978, 1980; Murphy, 1976; Warrick, 1981, 1983).
Several works by
different authors who have the same surname -- to avoid any confusion, include
their initials:
- L. Groarke (1981) findings were subsequently
replicated by P. Groarke (1984).
Several authors of a
single work -- give their surnames in alphabetical order, followed by the year
of publication in the usual way.
- 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:
- Name, date and page(s) appearing after a
quotation go after the closing quotation marks. The abbreviation pp. is used to
indicate page numbers when a quotation spans two pages from the source that you
read.
- If you want to leave words out of the
quotation, replace them with 5 dots to indicate that something has been taken
out of the original.
References
Every essay that you
write should include a full reference for each item that you have cited. This
gives your reader the information needed to find the source and consult it for
themselves. There are different ways of doing this, but all of them require you
to list:
- 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:
- Floppy disk failure
- Conflicting versions of the software
- Printer jams, no paper or low toner
Less obvious are things
like:
- 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.